
Class 

Book 

Copyright^ 

C___RIGHT DEPOSIT: 



Fundamentals of Faith 

in the 
Light of Modern Thought 



By 
HORACE BLAKE WILLIAMS 



«^^ 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1922, by 
HORACE BLAKE WILLIAMS 



Printed in the United States of America 



MAR 1 5 1922 
©GU659145 



''VvS 



/ 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction by Bishop Edwin Holt 

Hughes 5 

Preface 9 

I. Some Present-Day Tendencies in 

Religion 11 

II. The Reality of the Unseen 22 

III. Life's Demand for a Religion 37 

IV. Jesus Christ, the Answer to Life's 

Supreme Demand 53 

V. History's Testimony to Jesus' Claim . 69 

VI. The Problem of Evil 85 

VII. The Problem of Freedom 99 

VIII. What is Truth? Ill 

IX. Is Perfection Possible? 126 

X. Life's Great Paradox — Self-Asser- 
tion Versus Self-Renunciation .... 140 

XI. Life and Death 154 

XII. The Risen Lord 167 



INTRODUCTION 

Having had the privilege of an advance 
reading of the pages which follow, and having 
been requested to write some words of preface, 
I gladly enter these pages to serve as the 
forerunner for one of my friends and pastors. 

I cannot think that it so much matters 
whether I agree with every sentence that the 
author of this book has written. Doubtless 
few of us have ever found several hundred 
pages of writing with every detail of which 
our own personal views would correspond. 
For there is, after all, a personal orthodoxy, 
and there is a church orthodoxy. If we try 
a man by the personal standard, he may be 
quite heretical; if we try him by the church 
standard, he may be very sound. This is be- 
cause a church standard is and should be 
broader than a personal standard. If it were 
otherwise, thousands of labels of infallibility 
would plague the world. As an example, the 
Methodist Episcopal Church has no one doc- 
trine of scriptural inspiration. Mr. Wesley 
wisely put it that "the canonical books of the 
Old and New Testament Scriptures contain 
all things essential to salvation." Years of 

5 



6 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

thinking could not possibly have yielded a 
better or safer statement. That broad creed 
of inspiration has saved our church from a 
crisis. I hold to the dynamic theory of in- 
spiration; one of my ministerial friends holds 
to the verbal theory. From my personal 
standard I must regard him as heterodox, 
and from his personal standard he must re- 
gard me as heterodox. But from the church 
standpoint we are both orthodox, having room 
for each individual view within the ample 
statement of the church's creed. 

Now, the author of this book has won for 
himself the repute for independent thinking. 
His mind is not unacquainted with ventures. 
But the adventuresomeness is wholly reverent. 
The pioneer always remains the mystic; and 
when he does not dogmatically pronounce a 
sure opinion of the nature of the burning 
bush, we still know that he has obeyed the 
divine command for reverence, and that he 
regards the place whereon he stands as "holy 
ground." His touch upon the mysteries is 
never profane, nor sacrilegious, nor blas- 
phemous, nor even overbold. As I read the 
manuscript it seemed to me more than once 
that I could see the author listening intently 
and could hear him saying, "Speak, Lord, for 
thy servant heareth." It is very good and 



INTRODUCTION 7 

important to maintain that mood in the 
Church of the Living God, 

As for the main message of the pages, how 
much it is needed to-day! The world is 
noisy; we need to hear the still small voice. 
The world is nervous; we need to catch our 
Lord's command to rest. The world has a 
great visible; we need to get sure glimpses of 
the Invisible. The world is unduly lured by 
its own passing life; and it needs to lay hold 
on Him who is "the same yesterday, to-day, 
and forever." Consequently, the eternal in 
time is precisely the sense that the heart of 
the fussy world needs; and, like a refrain, that 
is at once major and minor, that note sounds 
in this volume. Above the towers of our 
clanging earthly cities, we see the turrets of 
the everlasting City of God. The mood of 
"everness" defeats the mood of "temporari- 
ness." The children of the Lord walk the 
ways of men; and those ways are all made 
to slope upward to those gates which we 
shall enter to go no more out forever. It is 
wonderful to dwell in eternity here — to feel 
that all fragments of the earthly calendar are 
made complete, by God's grace and our own 
purpose, so that even now the dates that are 
written under the term "Anno Domini" are 
given the meaning of the everlasting Lord. 



8 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

That, dear readers all, is the impression that 
this book has made on my own mind and 
heart. I am proud to have within the Boston 
Area a man who, in the midst of busy pas- 
torates and of overseas service, has been think- 
ing these thoughts. And I am glad to place 
these words of mine in the front of his book, 
as I put up a prayer that the message herein 
given may have a genuine mission for many 
of the Lord's children. 

Edwin H. Hughes. 

Maiden, Massachusetts. 



PREFACE 

The purpose of the chapters which follow 
is to attempt an interpretation of some of the 
more important facts of our Christian faith 
in terms of the ethical and scientific concepts 
of our own day. 

One principle has furnished the key to this 
interpretation, namely, the assumption that the 
fundamental fact of human history is the growth 
of eternal life in time, and that the value of 
any doctrine will depend upon its relation to 
this fact. This principle has determined both 
the choice of topics and the order of their 
arrangement. 

The doctrines of the Christian Church are 
made the subject of severe criticism to-day. 
Many men have withdrawn their consent 
from these doctrines, because they can no 
longer accept a certain form of statement 
with which they regard them as identified. I 
believe that there are eternal truths under- 
lying these articles of faith, and existing inde- 
pendent of them, which every honest and 
reasonable man will support, if they are brought 
to his attention. These are the truths by 

9 



10 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

which we must live. I have endeavored to 
bring them to light here. 

I do not mean to infer that what is presented 
in these pages is the sum-total of my own 
belief regarding any one of these truths. It 
is not my purpose, for instance, in the treat- 
ment of the claims of Jesus, to dismiss at a 
stroke a line of evidence which is dear to the 
hearts of many, and to them superlatively 
important. I insist, however, that if for any 
reason that evidence becomes valueless to any- 
one, Jesus still has certain fundamental claims 
upon a man's life, by reason of which that 
man owes to him his service and devotion. 
It is these claims that I have tried to make 
prominent in this argument. 

The ability of Christianity to stand the 
final test of a religion will rest, in the last 
analysis, not upon its marvelous aspects, but 
upon its truth concerning the nature of the 
human soul in its relation to God, and to 
eternity. 

Horace B. Williams. 

Manchester, New Hampshire. 



CHAPTER I 

SOME PRESENT-DAY TENDENCIES 
IN RELIGION 

These are days of religious unsettlement. 
While human life has made marvelous gains 
on its material side, and has won for it- 
self incalculable wealth, on its spiritual side 
it is marked by destitution and the lack of 
deep conviction. Outwardly our civilization 
has a most imposing presence, but earnest 
souls are conscious that it lacks something 
which is necessary to give it abiding worth. 
Various attempts are made to discover the 
secret of this lack. In the main these at- 
tempts have failed because they have been 
unable to break away from the spell of the 
conditions which they seek to correct. It 
would seem, then, that a search after the 
great need of our age should begin with an 
examination of the outstanding religious ten- 
dencies of the age, to ask whether they are 
the leaders or the servants of that which they 
are called to direct. 



The history of Christianity may be divided 
11 



12 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

into two great epochs, separated, roughly 
speaking, by the year 1600. These divisions 
are not mutually exclusive, they unfold into 
and overlap each other, but they represent 
periods when the life of Christian society has 
been dominated by tendencies distinct and 
opposite. The former may be characterized 
as the supernaturalistic, the latter as the 
naturalistic epoch in the church's life, 

Christianity arose in an age when the 
foundations of society were crumbling. The 
pagan religions had failed and passed the 
scepter to philosophy. Philosophy had ended 
in skepticism and the negation of those values 
upon which humanity had set her heart. Juda- 
ism arose in an attempt to interpret life in 
larger terms, but the failure of her national 
existence had involved the collapse of her 
religious hopes. The Roman Empire had 
established political order, but she lacked the 
power to create and preserve the deeper 
values of life. As a result the ancient world 
came under the shadow that must fall on any 
age that is not girded by great ideals. 

"On that hard pagan world disgust 

And secret loathing fell. 
Deep weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell." 1 

1 Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold. London, The Macmillan Com- 
pany. 1910. Poem, "Obermann Once More." 



PRESENT-DAY TENDENCIES 13 

Then it was that Christianity appeared, 
presenting a new view of life. If the old order 
had failed, she proposed the reality of a new 
order. She came to men with the proclama- 
tion of an invisible kingdom in which life's 
aims could be realized. If the visible world 
had proved insufficient, if it was unable to 
preserve the deeper values of life and give 
to life an abiding meaning, this was because 
it was only the husk of an inner world. This 
inner world is spiritual, and man must link 
his life with it and live for it if he is to find 
peace. The church is the visible expression 
of this inner world, and provides the way 
into its life. 

This announcement broke on that age like 
a burst of sunlight. 

"So well she mused, a morning broke 
Across her spirit gray; 
A conquering, new-born joy awoke, 
And filled her life with day." 1 

Men took heart and turned their faces toward 
the front. An exhausted society received a 
new vitality. A new life began to rise in the 
generations, and for a thousand years the 
Christian world moved forward under the im- 
pulse of that life, 

1 Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold. London, The Macmillan Com- 
pany. 1910. Poem, "Obermann Once More." 



14 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

But it was inevitable that the interest of 
man should turn again to this world. The 
weakness of early Christianity lay in the fact 
that it accepted the verdict of the ancients 
that this world is wholly empty, and proposed 
an order of life that was separate from it. 
With the beginning of the seventeenth century 
the attitude of thought begins to change. 
Attention turns again to the world of nature. 
Its glory and its beauty begin to throb in the 
mind of man. Scientific method is born. Its 
application produces a new world-view. Na- 
ture is broadened immeasurably by discovery 
and investigation, while at the same time she 
wins a depth of meaning and a unity of life. 
A new age, the age of naturalism, begins. 

Naturalism was inherently opposed to super- 
naturalism. The one looked for its guiding 
principle without; the other sought it within. 
Naturalism was based on two propositions 
destined to affect religious thought and life. 
It declared, first, that man is a part of nature, 
second, that nature is self-sufficient. And it 
was inevitable that under this influence the 
old view of a spiritual order apart from nature 
should gradually fade away. 

II 

At first the church opposed this attitude 



PRESENT-DAY TENDENCIES 15 

of mind. But it was no mere passing mood, 
and it was unavoidable that she should come 
under its sway. Although never openly in- 
dorsing the naturalistic position, she found her- 
self compelled to deal with it, and later to 
make friends with it. To-day the forms of 
her life are largely determined by it. The 
outstanding religious tendencies of our day are 
inherently naturalistic tendencies. As we look 
over our religious life, what are its distinctive 
features? 

1. The tendency to rationalize the content 
of religion. Never before was the demand 
so insistent that the facts of religion shall 
submit to critical examination. The scientific 
method of investigation that has spread itself 
throughout every sphere of life has invaded 
the sacred precincts of faith. No object of 
faith can hope to escape it. God, revelation, 
miracle, providence — all the sacred mysteries of 
other days — must present themselves before 
the bar of criticism. The man of to-day re- 
fuses to be bound by beliefs and opinions that 
have no other claim to reverence than their 
age. He insists that the Bible shall bear the 
weight of critical investigation and approve its 
claim against this test. Essentially this spirit 
is the Protestant spirit. Protestantism arose 
as a cry of freedom. It was the answer to the 



16 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

divine command, "Prove all things." Under 
its influence great good has been accomplished. 
The Bible has become a new book; religion 
has broadened its meaning; the light of 
intelligence has fallen upon the church's 
path. 

2. The tendency to humanize religious values. 
One of the outstanding characteristics of the 
age is its return to the human standpoint. 
All the values of life are measured by their 
contribution to human welfare. Man finds 
the key to his problems within himself. Things 
are of worth as they minister to his life. In 
philosophy this new humanism has taken the 
form of a restatement of metaphysical prob- 
lems originating with James, Dewey, and 
Schiller, and known as pragmatism, which 
measures all values in terms of practical con- 
sequence. This same spirit sets a definite 
task before religion. It must relate itself to 
everyday life. It must minister to human 
welfare. The church must justify her place 
in society by her contribution to man's material 
well-being. She cannot stand aside from the 
struggles of life — struggles political, economic, 
social. If so, she forfeits her right to the 
respect and support of men. In the battle of 
the workingman for larger liberty and larger 
gains she must show a sympathetic and active 



PRESENT-DAY TENDENCIES 17 

interest. But this tendency is inherently a 
naturalistic tendency. It is based upon the 
supposition that human life is sufficient in 
itself. 

3. Closely associated with this is another — 
the tendency to socialize religious effort. This 
is the result of a new consciousness that the 
gospel of Jesus has its application to the 
present world, and that the kingdom of God 
is to be realized on earth in the reconstruction 
of human society. During the last twenty- 
five years we have passed over rapidly from 
the individual to the social emphasis in re- 
ligion. The church is beginning to realize 
that to fulfill Christianity's mission to the 
individual she must Christianize social condi- 
tions. These are the molds in which the 
individual life is made. This tendency is 
giving birth to new forms of service. It is 
ordaining a new ministry and creating a new 
architecture. Not only so. It asserts itself 
as the sum of Christian duty. For is not the 
message of Jesus a social message, and is not 
love the fulfillment of the whole law? But 
the more insistent it becomes, the more it 
falls into the naturalistic position of the pre- 
ceding tendency, that if men are fed and 
clothed and recruited, the social problem will 
be solved and life will come to its own. 



18 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

III 

These, I maintain, are the outstanding ten- 
dencies of the religious life of our day. They 
have been productive of much good. They 
have wrought for the spread of religious 
activity. But examined closely they present a 
negative aspect. Life has gained in breadth 
while it has lost in depth. Practical effort 
has grown immensely, but in the meantime the 
contemplative life has withdrawn into the 
background. Methods for deepening spiritual 
experience are dying out. The practice of 
prayer and belief in its efficacy are becoming 
less and less. The need of the means of grace 
for the deepening of the devotional life is no 
longer felt. Looking closer still, we discover 
that these tendencies are based upon a funda- 
mentally false conviction, namely, that life is 
determined by external relations; that if exter- 
nal relations are changed, life will become 
wholly satisfactory. They forget that life 
draws from an inner source and must find its 
control there. 

Thus we are not surprised to find that with 
all its achievement this is an age of religious 
unrest. Despite our gains in knowledge and 
the control of the resources of nature, we are 
not happy. Life is beset with stern contra- 
dictions and difficult problems, and lacks both 



PRESENT-DAY TENDENCIES 19 

the power and the insight to deal with these 
successfully. The ideals of our religion, with 
all their glamour and appeal, are unable to 
provide a principle broad enough to coordinate 
our multiplied activities or deep enough to 
command our unquestioning loyalty. There- 
fore the feeling is abroad that somehow re- 
ligion is losing her soul. 

Biblical criticism is good; but the Bible for 
many has lost that axiomatic certainty in the 
light of which the earlier ages lived, and we 
are apt to forget that intellect alone cannot 
settle the problems of faith, that reason alone 
cannot enter that life of the spirit that throbs 
through Scripture. Service of humanity is 
good; but we must remember that life is more 
than physical preservation, and that true wel- 
fare must be measured not by outward accre- 
tion, but by inward expansion. A testimony 
to the hollowness of the age comes to us from 
the recent European war. Conscientious men 
are asking, What is the matter? Is Chris- 
tianity a failure? With all our civilization 
men are yet brutal and cruel. Something is 
the matter. The matter is that we have put 
success ahead of self-realization, that life is 
being lost in the effort to live. 

This brings us to the one thing needful to 
our age: a reaffirmation of the reality and 



20 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

necessity of the spiritual life. Life must win 
an inner depth, if it is to win stability and 
peace. For life is more than outward rela- 
tions. It has temptations to face, burdens to 
bear, sorrows to suffer, inner perfection to 
gain. These are possible only as we are able 
inwardly to transcend the world, and thereby 
gain a victory over it. The soul must live a 
life independent of the world, of time; it must 
be liberated from human limitation. This can 
be only as it wins an inner meaning for itself. 
Of this deeper life Jesus Christ is the world's 
example. He lived in constant communion 
with the infinite, and thereby his life was 
raised above sin and chance to perfection and 
truth. His kingdom was the inauguration of 
a new world of spiritual meaning and victorious 
trust. His teaching was the endeavor to show 
men the way into that spiritual world. In 
this his divinity consists: the depth of his 
experience, his consciousness of union with 
God. If Jesus Christ is to be the Saviour 
of this age, he must be our spiritual Master, 
that is, he must bring us in touch with a 
deeper life that cleanses the heart, strengthens 
the will, and renews the mind. 

There comes to me a story from the later 
days of Jesus' life. One evening as the shades 
began to fall he came to that home in Bethany 



PRESENT-DAY TENDENCIES 21 

where he had rested so many times. There 
were two sisters there. One of them busied 
herself with the supper-getting; the other, 
realizing that Jesus' stay was short and that 
there were many things to ask about the mean- 
ing of life, sat at his feet and communed with 
him. Martha complained because her sister 
did not help, and Jesus said, "Martha, Martha, 
thou art anxious and troubled about many 
things: but one thing is needful: for Mary 
hath chosen the good part, which shall not be 
taken away from her." Two views of life are 
here presented to Jesus — a receptive idealism 
and a practical realism — and he is asked to 
choose. The other day Kipling wrote his 
poem entitled "The Sons of Martha," in eulogy 
of the latter view of life. The whole poem is 
replete with that fallacy that is too much 
characteristic of our age. For the ultimate 
question of life is Mary's question: how we 
can make firm its spiritual values. This is 
the end for which humanity exists. This is 
the road to our highest realization. To be 
able to say with Madame Guy on: 

"I love thee, Lord, but all the love is thine, 
For by thy life I live. 
I am as nothing, and rejoice to be 
Emptied, and lost, and swallowed up in thee," 



CHAPTER II 
THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 

Our view of being is fundamental. It 
determines the character of our thought, the 
general direction of activity, and therefore the 
ultimate issue of life. 

At first suggestion this statement may ap- 
pear unwarranted. Among the factors that 
determine life we are not accustomed to place 
a man's philosophy, much less do we make it 
essential. Men who have won certain definite 
conceptions of reality are no doubt greatly 
influenced by the beliefs which these concep- 
tions support, but their number is small as 
compared with the multitude who have never 
even thought of being as such. 

We forget, however, that a belief need not 
come up to the level of clear understanding to 
become effective. Few beliefs of the common 
man are formally understood. They grow up 
in his life like the faculty of perception: need 
calls them forth and experience gives them 
form, but the process of growth and the result 
thus attained are largely unnoticed. A man 
may possess beliefs that are undefined, even 

22 



THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 23 

unrecognized, but which nevertheless lend color 
to his every thought and deed. Whether we 
will it or not, we must build upon some philos- 
ophy of life. Thought must have a basis in 
conception; action must have some principle 
of coordination. There are also instincts and 
aspirations native to life, upon whose satis- 
faction happiness depends, which involve a 
man's view of being. 

This demand for a philosophy of life is 
increased by reason of the transient nature 
of human affairs. If we dwell alone in the 
world of things — that is, in the world as it 
reports itself to us — we can find there nothing 
that abides. Life moves on amid shifting 
scenes, in which the very thread of its own 
experience is changing. Without some inner 
principle to bind together these changing expe- 
riences and make them one — one both in 
themselves and with the world — man's existence 
is weighed down by the sense of insecurity 
and all its more sacred values are robbed of 
meaning. Is there no permanence in things 
— no solid ground upon which man may plant 
his foot? In the changing life of phenomena 
is there nothing that abides? These questions 
press upon us and will not down. Upon the 
answer we give to them hangs the worth of 
life's meaning; without an answer, the impulse 



24 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

is gone that might lead us to make out of 
this changing world something great and good* 



In general, two views of reality have been 
held by the thinking world. One, the ma- 
terialistic view. This regards the external 
world as primary. What can be perceived 
by the five senses and investigated it calls the 
real. These outward things are the facts, they 
are the realities. The inner life of conscious- 
ness is interpreted in terms of the outer world, 
and finds its sufficient explanation as a result 
of physical processes. 

This view has always been popular, for to 
most of us the outer world seems the solid 
and real. It appears to be supported by the 
most tangible and obvious experiences of hu- 
man life. Yet, closely examined, materialism 
is confronted by serious difficulty. This outer 
world can be known to us only by the senses, 
and we have no possible assurance that they 
report reality — things as they are. Indeed, 
we know that very often they deceive us, that 
they report things as we have reason to believe 
they are not. It may be that Lotze's claim 
that all perception of the external world is a 
deception, is extreme. Yet when we take into 
account the degree to which the perception 



THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 25 

of spatial objects is a mental synthesis, and 
is determined not by the "thing" itself, but 
by the habit of the mind, the ground for this 
claim becomes evident. Errors of percep- 
tion are innumerable. One or two simple 
instances will call this to attention. You sit 
in a stationary railway carriage, while another 
train alongside begins to move. Immediately 
you decide that your train is moving and 
that the other is still, and only discover the 
mistake by reference to your sense of vibration 
or to some familiar stationary object. Your 
eye tells you that the afternoon sun sinking 
toward the west is moving; but as a matter 
of fact we are taught to believe that the sun 
is the great fixed central hub and that it is 
ourselves that move. There are cases, then, 
when certain of our senses deceive us, but 
being able to check up the impression with 
the other senses we call this an illusion. May 
there not be cases where our senses unite in 
deceiving us, but since most people's senses 
are like ours and they confirm our impression, 
we agree to call what is merely a great sensible 
illusion reality? At least there is room for 
grave doubt as to the sufficiency of the ma- 
terialistic position. 

Over against materialism is the spiritual- 
istic view. This regards the spirit in man as 



26 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

the great reality. Spirit is the permanent, 
the enduring, it is the true life. Of this life 
man's body is merely an instrument which 
may at any time be thrown away. All that 
comes to us through the senses from the out- 
side world is changing and temporal. Back 
of this too is a spiritual life and meaning which 
is forever unfolding itself. This is the reality 
— the abiding amid the changes of time. 

It would be profitless here to enter into an 
exhaustive criticism of these two methods of 
interpretation. It is a sufficient statement 
that the great minds in every age, who have 
sought an answer to the deeper demands of 
life, have found themselves driven to the 
spiritualistic position. They have been forced 
to believe that the seen is the creation of the 
unseen, that the material world is the product 
of thought, that mind, not matter, is the great 
reality. 

As a matter of fact, we all necessarily, though 
perhaps unconsciously, accept this view as a 
working basis of life. For instance, we call 
the structure in which we worship on the Sab- 
bath a church, by which we mean, what? 
Materials? No! A church is the realized 
ideal of some architect, saturated with the 
most sacred sentiments of some worshiping 
congregation. Away yonder among the hills 



THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 37 

is a place you call home It is only a modest 
cottage built of the humblest materials, but 
you never think of it without sentiment, and 
you travel back there every summer to linger 
near it. From the standpoint of materials it 
is worthless; but as you sit upon its step 
some vacation morn that step and door and 
mantel are vocal of souls and experiences past 
and gone. The fact is we live in a world of 
invisibles, a world of homes and churches and 
schools, of ideals embodied and ideas visualized. 

In like manner as we look out thoughtfully 
upon nature there comes to us a sense that 
this too is full of meaning. Its objects are 
symbols. In it is a soul that speaks to our 
soul. The hill and vale, the stream and field, 
are the characters of an eternal language. 
The same is true of the universe as a whole. 
This too is the embodiment of thought. The 
very fact that we can interpret it argues a 
reason immanent in it that answers to our 
own, for only that which proceeds from thought 
can be interpreted by thought. 

We must estimate the meaning of things not 
in terms of the seen but of the unseen. This 
does not mean that we are to despise these 
earthly forms. The Oriental has taught his 
fellows that this world revealed to the senses 
is simply a mirage, and therefore it is to be 



28 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

ignored. A mirage is a mere semblance, but 
this is not our world. What we see and hear 
and feel is the temporal form of reality; it is 
the eternal subjected to creature use. The 
Christian ascetic withdrew from the world 
and hoped to enter into reality by thinking 
himself away from contact with the things 
of time. He failed of his aim because he for- 
got that there are no other characters than 
these earthly forms from which we can learn 
the meaning of reality, no other way-marks 
by means of which we can find the eternal. 

II 

This principle of interpretation applies not 
only to things but to events. The great world 
of events, like the great world of things, has 
an inner meaning which is the abiding reality 
amid the changes of circumstance. 

There are two ways to read history, just as 
there are two ways to view reality. It may 
be considered as a mere succession of happen- 
ings, each event sufficient unto itself, each 
page we turn with a relation only of sequence 
to that which precedes. China creeping out of 
the distant past; Egypt sitting like a sphinx 
on the bank of her river; Greece, Rome, the 
Goths, the Saxons — they all follow each other 
in a wandering aimless manner. But there is 



THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 29 

another way: that expressed by Hegel when 
he says that history is "the unfolding of 
spiritual being in time." There is a purpose 
in it all which if understood would account 
for each step in the process. History is not 
a mere succession of events, it is the pro- 
gressive unfolding of the divine idea; its inner 
meaning is spiritual. These things we call 
events are symbols — symbols of a hidden life, 
just as the bud and leaf are symbols of growth. 
In their good time they appear, for their brief 
day they endure, as the forms in time of an 
ever-growing, ever-changing life. They have 
value, not because of their temporal form, nor, 
as we are wont to think, because they bring 
pain or pleasure to the race; their meaning 
lies in this, that they are the birth-throes by 
which the eternal spirit goes on to higher 
forms of manifestation. 

Out of the mists of the distant past man 
emerges with the marks of the jungle upon 
him. For many centuries his path is dark 
and obscure, and when occasionally he appears 
before us he is clothed with deeds of bar- 
barism. Then a light breaks upon the path, 
at first dim and scattered, but growing in 
depth and clearness. Certain religious beliefs 
appear, with corresponding moral conceptions 
that lend direction to the course and give 



30 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

character to the story. Then Jesus Christ 
steps out upon the scene with the message of 
a new life. At first he touches a little group 
of followers, the circle of his influence widens, 
the handful grows into an army that sets out 
to win the world. Broken and persecuted, they 
persevere in their purpose, coining defeat 
into courage; the ranks increase, the borders 
widen, and they enter the twentieth century 
with the slogan, "The world for Christ in this 
generation." Sometimes the army has been 
driven back, sometimes it has wandered from 
the path, but the course has been steadily 
forward, and, looking back over it all, we see 
that behind the world of events is a soul of 
things that gives meaning to it all. 

We have not discovered the key to human 
history until we have learned that all events 
are essentially spiritual. Many an incident 
which to its own day was a mere catastrophe 
has been found by the centuries following to 
be the revelation of some wondrous truth to 
the hearts of men. It is not what attracts 
the attention of the men of any age that 
endures — wealth, fame, material success; these 
soon pass away and are gone. But the thoughts 
that are begotten, and the ideals that are 
cherished in the hearts of the great men of 
the age, for which their lives are a sacrifice, 



THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 31 

these abide. The Roman Empire failed to 
see anything sublime in the teaching of Paul. 
The political rulers could not believe that he 
had anything to do with the destinies of their 
world. They made the mistake common to 
men of the world of thinking that the things 
they saw were the real things. Gone are the 
armies, cities, and palaces of Paul's day; but 
his ideals still live, registered in the institu- 
tions of our Christian civilization. Dante's 
generation drove him out a fugitive on the 
hillsides. They left him there. The storm beat 
on him. In the darkness his soul sobbed out 
its sorrow. But one day Carlyle rises up to 
tell the world that "ten silent centuries found 
voice in Dante." The world is wiser than it 
seems. As time rolls round it remembers 
only the things of worth. If we blind our- 
selves to the spiritual meaning of our own 
day, remember, the generations that come will 
see that day only in terms of its spiritual 
meaning. The first century sent Jesus Christ 
to the cross, and bowed down before Pilate; 
the twentieth century has nothing but disdain 
for Pilate, while it places Christ upon a throne. 
To-day burns John Huss at the stake, to- 
morrow does honor to his memory. This gen- 
eration erects a monument to Garibaldi, whom 
the last generation made a fugitive from 



32 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

justice. The world is wiser than we think, 
and out of the field of the centuries it har- 
vests only the things that abide. 

Ill 

A spiritualistic interpretation of history alone 
provides a satisfactory basis for an under- 
standing of the many puzzles of life. 

1. It furnishes a key to unlock the mystery 
of affliction. Life is a warfare, full of blinding 
sorrows and the wounding of our noblest 
sensibilities. There is no path that is not 
crossed by mishap, no burden that does not 
gall the shoulder, no friendship that is not 
made to be broken. The cause of pleasure is 
also the cause of pain; our source of hope is 
our reason for despair. One might expect 
that as we rise in the scale of life we should 
rid ourselves of its afflictions; but, alas! the 
higher we climb the more sensible we are to 
pain. With the deepening of civilization comes 
the deepening of our souPs sensibilities. This 
thought of itself tends to fill one with despair. 
But if we can believe that there is a hidden 
worth in these experiences, and a purpose 
that is beneficent, while they appear none 
the less harsh, they become at least more 
reasonable. 

The problem of the world's suffering is al- 



THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 33 

ways an enigma, but one thing is clear. What- 
ever be the justification, out of the strife and 
struggle come the treasures of the ages. Come 
back with me to the fourteenth century in 
England. A dark cloud gathers in the east 
and death springs up from the ground. Men 
die, women and children die; the baron in 
the castle, the monk in the abbey, the villein 
on the farm, all die. The terror is called the 
black death. In some towns not a single man 
is left. Then the springtime comes, and the 
summer sun with healing in his wings; and 
health returns; but the half of England is 
gone. Terrible! yes; but out of that stream 
of death came a new England. The feudal 
system with its mailed hand of bondage was 
doomed. The barons were dead; there was 
so much to do and there were so few to do it 
that the laborer began to go w T here he wished 
and to demand a fair wage for his work. Thirty 
years later came the uprising that made the 
English peasant the freest man of his class 
in the world. 

And so it is in our lives. Many experiences 
bear the aspect of tragedy, and their curse is 
unmitigated unless they can be made to serve 
a spiritual end. 

2. It gives a point of view from which to 
understand death. Life at best is a process 



34 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

of decay. While the history of man has been 
marked by conquest over opposition and 
difficulty, and the banishment of ignorance 
and fear, one enemy has mocked his genius 
and defied his rule. That enemy is the power 
of dissolution. He builds, and it tears down. 
It sends its rust to eat up his handiwork; 
its mold to destroy his libraries; it taxes his 
health and faculties until at last "the silver 
cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, 
or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or 
the wheel broken at the cistern; and the dust 
return to the earth as it was. 55 

This fact has been sufficient to fill even the 
heart of the strong man with despair. Fall- 
ing on death at seventy-two, Confucius, the 
great sage of the East, cried out, "The great 
mountain must crumble, the strong beam must 
break, and the wise man wither away like a 
plant. 55 "Man giveth up the ghost and where 
is he? 55 was the sad refrain of the Hebrew 
prophet. And indeed, if there is no ground 
for believing that back of this decaying form 
there is an abiding spirit, this despair is reason- 
able. The only trustworthy optimism grows 
out of an ability to set time over against 
eternity, the seen over against the unseen, 
with the promise of an inheritance beyond. 
Then death is not going out, it is going home. 



THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN 35 

It is the spirit coining to its own. It is break- 
ing through the veil into the realm of the 
unseen, into the world of eternal things. 

Hall Caine is a great prophet of the soul. 
Have you read his story of Lord Nuneham 
in The White Prophet? Ruling with the hand 
of a tyrant, Nuneham had succeeded in bring- 
ing order out of chaos, and establishing a 
measure of prosperity in the land of the Nile. 
But as he had grown old the people had grown 
restless, and his empire was crumbling. 
Through all these years his wife, a choice 
spirit, had busied herself with those duties 
and devotions that lend culture to the deeper 
life. Then came the day when the Egyptian 
nurse knocked at the door to call Nuneham 
upstairs to close his wife's eyes in death. He 
looked upon her face radiant with celestial 
hope, he listened to her final reaffirmation of 
her faith, then returning to his study he 
seated himself in meditation. Memory called 
the roll of friends and foes come and gone. 
He saw the vision of his youth fading away 
just as its fulfillment was at hand, and search- 
ing questions came to him. "Can it be possi- 
ble/ 5 he said, "that I have been occupying 
myself, after all, with the mere semblance of 
things, which we call by the great names, 
civilization and progress, while that simple 



36 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

soul upstairs has been grasping the eternal 
realities?" 1 

The years roll by, the wheel turns round, 
and ever the sand runs out. In April the 
trees clothe themselves with leaves; only a 
few weeks, they fall and are gone. So is it 
with the generations of men. But the record 
of truth and goodness remains; God's eternal 
purpose abides. The task of our lives is to 
make the unseen real. Wherever a life of 
virtue is manifest in mortal flesh, wherever 
men and women adorn themselves with spir- 
itual graces and spend themselves for the 
common good, there the unseen becomes real. 
And he who sets himself to this task will find 
his inner life ever renewed, so that, though he 
die daily, yet he shall be able to say, "I faint 
not." 



1 Hall Caine, The White Prophet. New York, D. Appleton & Company. 
1909. 



CHAPTER III 

LIFE'S DEMAND FOR A RELIGION 

There is nothing more characteristically 
human than the religious impulse, yet, as often 
occurs, that which is most common in expe- 
rience is most difficult to explain. Until the 
middle of the nineteenth century religion was 
viewed as an incidental feature in human life, 
and students attributed its origin to sources 
wholly casual. Fear made the gods; religion 
is an invention of priests; religion is a projec- 
tion of the tendency in early man to personify 
the objects of nature; the worship of ancestors 
is the mother of religion. These are some of 
the answers to the quest after the source of 
those forms of faith that constitute the record 
of the religious history of the race. 

It is perhaps the chief service of the science 
of religion that it has exposed the fallacy of 
this view. Instead of the religious impulse 
being incidental to life, it is found to be funda- 
mental. Man's mental structure is essentially 
religious. From the beginning of human his- 
tory there is evidence of a principle which 
has given birth to all forms of religious ex- 
37 



38 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

pression, and which constitutes a bond of 
unity deeper than all racial distinctions. 

In general, this impulse may be defined as 
a sense of need, a longing after something. 
"Just at the time when the human race was 
beginning to come upon the scene/ 5 says John 
Fiske, speaking as an evolutionist, "there 
came into the human mind the beginnings of 
a groping after something that lies outside 
and beyond the world of sense." 1 Man as 
man is conscious of the need of protection and 
direction, of cleansing from uncleanness, of 
power beyond his own strength. Through a 
multiplicity of forms, in different ages and 
races, this consciousness has sought expression, 
until at last it finds utterance in an insistent 
demand for God. Fear, ancestor worship, the 
personification of the objects of nature, repre- 
sent the method by which man has blindly 
sought an answer to life's great demand; but 
always, back of all, is this innate longing for 
higher communion. This longing disturbs the 
soul from the first dawn of consciousness. It 
is deeper rooted than any other want. It is 
more insistent than any other desire. Years 
cannot silence it. Our desires change as the 
years pass by. Youth loves pleasure; manhood, 



1 John Fiske, A Century of Science, p. 114. Boston, Houghton Mifflin 
Company. 1899. 



DEMAND FOR A RELIGION 39 

achievement; old age, rest. But ever present, 
behind all our desires is this hereditary want, 
an endless aspiration, a longing for something 
beyond, a discontent with life as it is and a 
reaching out toward a good that is un- 
defined. 

I 

Whence comes this longing? The answer to 
this question will not only throw light upon 
man's nature; it will also enable us to under- 
stand some of the more permanent beliefs 
that have influenced his career. 

1. It is a necessary result of our being. We 
are finite creatures, and consciously so, and 
therefore find life inadequate in itself. From 
whatever standpoint human existence is viewed, 
it is found to be subject to limitation; it stands 
in relations of dependence to a larger life. 
These relations would not trouble us, we should 
adjust ourselves instinctively to the condition 
in which we are, were it not that consciousness 
is ever bringing them to light. Consciousness, 
as we know it, not only performs its function, 
but acquires its nature through reference to a 
larger whole. Beneath and beyond all con- 
sciousness of finite things, all subjective feel- 
ings and interests, there is always this wider 
reference which constitutes the significance of 



40 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

each* It is the genius of consciousness, not 
that the soul is moved by desires, nor appealed 
to by another, but that it transcends itself 
and the other, and gathers both up in an all- 
embracing whole. 

The knowledge of any object lies in the 
fact of its limitation. Any object of knowl- 
edge derives its meaning not from itself but 
as a part of a larger whole. Meaning or pur- 
pose is always a term of relation. It pre- 
supposes not only knowing a subject, but also 
a wider range of meaning upon which its 
character depends. To define an object is 
simply to set certain definite limits upon the 
universe to which it belongs. Like the horizon, 
our definition is a boundary; it points within 
and it points beyond. Nay, more — the inner 
reference is dependent upon the outer and 
exists because of it. This object before me 
is a book. A book is a printed record of facts. 
What facts? Facts of history, of nature. 
Thus every fact of knowledge is a questioner 
leading us outward toward the boundless 
circle of the whole. Here we get the force of 
Tennyson's words when he wrote: 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower- — but if I could understand 



DEMAND FOR A RELIGION 41 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 1 

The self, the I, the fundamental principle of 
human experience, is always incomplete. It 
is not only capable of development in and of 
itself; it draws from and reaches toward 
another life which forms its essential ground 
and constitutes its source of meaning. A full 
defense of this statement would be beyond 
the range of these pages. I appeal not only 
to religion but to philosophy as witness, I 
am not unaware that there is a group of 
philosophers who deny w r hat I say. Their 
voice is but a whisper in the great chorus of 
those with whom I am in accord. For the 
oldest Hindu philosophy as well as the latest 
European idealism agree in the claim that 
the individual is the sharer in a self -conscious- 
ness which includes all individuals. This 
claim constitutes the eternal foundation of 
religion. The purpose of religion has always 
been to discover the nature of this universal 
consciousness and relate man's life to it in 
the most helpful way. 

All the deeper problems of our lives as 
individuals are set for us by this relation to 

iTbe relation of the finite to the infinite has been presented by Herbert 
Spencer in First Principles, and Max Muller in Natural Religion, A eare- 
ful consideration of these views is given by Edward Caird in The Evolu- 
tion of Religion, vol. i, lecture 4. 



42 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

a larger life. Every such problem is a form 
of unrest, and life's unrest, so varied in ex- 
pression, has its source in one central want. 
Doubt and perplexity, sorrow and care, all the 
disappointments that harass our days, are, as 
Hegel put it, "obstructions of finitude." Not 
only so, but the struggle and striving, that go 
under the names "ambition," "industry," "as- 
piration," and constitute so great a part of 
human enterprise, are prompted by this death- 
less yearning for fuller experience. The soul 
is never satisfied with its present attainment. 
Whatever be its estate, the broadening horizon 
of the unattained is a constant allurement in 
the presence of which every possession is 
robbed of its charm. This fact has been given 
powerful statement in the familiar passage of 
Thomas Carlyle. 1 "Will the whole finance- 
ministers and upholsterers and confectioners of 
modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock com- 
pany, to make one shoeblack happy? They 
cannot accomplish it above an hour or two; 
for the shoeblack also has a soul, quite other 
than his stomach, and would require, if you 
consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and 
saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and 
no less: God's infinite universe altogether to 
himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill 

1 Sartor Resartus, book ii, chap. ix. 



V 



DEMAND FOR A RELIGION 43 

every wish as fast as it rose- . . . Try him with 
half a universe, half of an omnipotence, he 
sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the 
other half, and declares himself the most mal- 
treated of men. Always there is a black spot 
in our sunshine; it is even, as I said, the shadow 
of ourselves/ 5 

2. This longing comes not only because we 
are finite beings, but because we are moral 
beings. We are not only surrounded by a 
larger life and a larger good of which we form 
a part, but we are bound to that larger life 
by ties of obligation, and in the presence of 
that larger good a feeling of self-accusation 
haunts the soul. It is no mere trifle of expe- 
rience that the path of man is clouded by a 
sense of unworthiness. This too belongs to 
the very nature of man's being. 

If man could be satisfied with what he is, 
life would be a comparatively easy affair. But 
this is not the case. Over against what he is 
hovers a sense of what he ought to be, filling 
him with an inextinguishable longing for an 
unrealized good, and making his present lot 
unsatisfactory. This opposition in man's life 
may not be sharply defined in his earlier his- 
tory; nevertheless it exists; a sense of ought- 
ness is never absent from human nature. This 
constitutes man a moral being. For what is 



44 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

morality? It is to be lifted out of oneself and 
made conscious of an ideal law one is bound 
to fulfill and at the same time is far from 
fulfilling. Man cannot escape the presence of 
this law. Like the girding of the infinite, this 
too is the ever-present shadow of himself. 
Somehow life is under constant judgment 
before the standard of the ideal. So far as one 
conscientiously seeks the demands of that 
ideal, his conduct is approved; wherein he 
fails, his soul is shadowed with a sense of 
un worthiness: where the standard is ignored 
there results a feeling of condemnation which 
renders happiness impossible. It is not nec- 
essary here to outline the evolution of this 
standard. Suffice it to say that in whatever 
form it appears it represents a will, man's 
own, yet not his own, to which he owes obedi- 
ence, and in the presence of which he is judged. 
Therefore a fundamental instinct of the human 
soul is to find atonement for moral failure 
and win freedom from condemnation in the 
presence of this higher will. 

There is a characteristic incident recorded 
in the fifth chapter of Luke. Peter, James, 
and John had been out on the Sea of Galilee 
fishing all night, and without success. In the 
morning they beached their boat and were 
washing their nets when Jesus appeared and 



DEMAND FOR A RELIGION 45 

bade them push forth again and let down into 
the sea. Despite failure, they obeyed, and lo! 
the nets were filled. But, the record says, 
immediately Simon Peter, falling down at 
Jesus 5 knees, cried out, "Depart from me, for 
I am a sinful man, Lord." Here is the story 
of fruitless toil, and success at the Master's 
word, but in the midst of all this man bursts 
forth in confesssion. And so it ever is. Amid 
the din and roar of our daily tasks there is 
an undertone of self-judgment of which every- 
one is conscious. Peter is no exception. The 
first man utters this consciousness in the story 
of the beginning, "I heard thy voice in the 
garden, and I was afraid"; and this utterance 
is characteristic of every member of the race. 
God has set up his throne in the human heart, 
and there every man is brought constantly to 
judgment before the awful self-revealing sub- 
limity of the eternal. 

3. With this sense of un worthiness there is 
also a sense of weakness. Great is the life 
of man. Wondrous in his powers and faculties, 
he is wondrous too in his achievement. The 
story of the triumphs of science during the 
past hundred years reads like the age of myth 
and fable. If we had not seen with our own 
eyes the marvelous gains that have been made, 
we should find it hard to believe such achieve- 



46 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

ments were possible. But when one stands 
face to face with the soul's task it is a different 
story — a story of struggle and defeat, of failure 
and sin. The other day Alfred Russel Wallace 
wrote his Social Environment and Moral 
Progress, in which he maintains that while 
the higher nature of man has developed im- 
measurably in some directions, from the stand- 
point of morals man is to-day elevated little 
above the earliest condition that history records. 
We may not agree with Wallace's claim, but 
at least it causes us pause, that after twenty 
centuries of Christian progress such a state- 
ment should be made in all seriousness. 

Human weakness is due both to the mag- 
nitude of the hindrance and the altitude of 
the goal. Whatever be our philosophy of life, 
one thing is evident: life must make its progress 
against opposition, and sometimes this opposi- 
tion appears insurmountable. As the centuries 
have passed, man has triumphed over ignorance 
within and various difficulties without, but he 
is still, as Wallace said, a slave to self and 
passion. Evil habit binds its chain about him 
and robs him of his freedom. In despair he 
cries out, as one did long ago, "O wretched 
man that I am; who shall deliver me from 
the body of this death?" Then, too, the goal 
— this seems disproportionate to man's ability. 



DEMAND FOR A RELIGION 47 

The caged eagle knows that if his prison door 
is opened, he can spread his wings and rise 
into the empyrean. His bondage is an im- 
posed bondage. Man is not caged, he is free. 
He sees the height, but his wings are unde- 
veloped, or his wings are broken. How shall 
he rise with an eaglet's wing? Who will help 
his feeble soarings to attain the height? Living 
in a world full of uncleanness, life demands of 
us purity — and who can be pure? Your outer 
acts are clean — has no base thought or pas- 
sion been harbored in your soul? The deeper 
we go into life, the more keenly we realize the 
magnitude of the soul's task, and with that 
realization there is begotten an endless longing 
for help from the beyond. 

4. Then there are those things we call evils, 
that afflict mankind with endless misery, and 
are so difficult to understand. These too 
constitute a perennial demand for God. 

It would be far from me to seek to minimize 
the joyousness of human life. It is good to 
live and breathe, to work and get tired, to 
sleep and rest. Our faculties are attuned to 
a million sights and sounds that fill the soul 
with music. The necessary functions of life 
all have their pleasure-tone. Yet there is 
another side to the picture. One may under- 
estimate the joyousness of life, but he is blind 



48 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

indeed who fails to recognize that life is full 
of trouble and care, anguish and pain, heart 
ache and bitterness. The king of old wore 
sackcloth under his purple, and every man 
wears his sackcloth. Behind the smile and 
the cheery word there is often the noiseless 
pain of a hidden burden. What plans we have 
made, what hopes we have cherished, what 
friends we have had! — and now the plans 
have failed, the hopes are blighted, the friends 
are gone. And so, says Bossuet, the famous 
preacher at the court of Louis XIV, "We 
arrive at last at the tomb dragging after us 
the long chain of our broken hopes." Life 
is a battlefield with no truce possible in the 
fight. Whether the army retreat or go forward, 
the way is strewn with wounded heroes, de- 
serted pennons, and men who have crawled 
away into the quiet to die. O the pathos of it! 
The Great War has accentuated for many 
of us the shadow side of life. 1 Every morning 
there passes before the face of the sun a cloud 
of gloom, rising from the battlefields of Europe, 
where the bravest and best of our sons are 
pouring out their lives amid scenes of agony, 
hate, and slaughter. Men meet upon the 
streets with a question in the eye — the diurnal 
question. Now and then some anxious soul 

1 Written during the Great War. 



DEMAND FOR A RELIGION 49 

trembles into words: "Why is this so? Why 
must this suffering be?" From millions of 
homes once light and happy there rises up the 
silent wail of a great sorrow. With this shadow, 
however, there has come also a new and deep- 
ening interest in spiritual things. The soldier 
in the trenches begins to talk of God. The 
essayist, who long ago dismissed the teaching 
of the Christian Church as exploded tradition, 
has suddenly become the prophet of religion. 
Why this change? Amid the horror, wretched- 
ness, and shame that the war has entailed men 
turn instinctively, as they have always done, to 
the great Unknown for consolation and hope. 

"The desire of the moth for the star, 
Of the night for the morrow, 
The devotion to something afar 
From the sphere of our sorrow." 1 

II 

What shall we do with this longing? Shall 
we stand here on the shores of time, like 
Enoch Arden crying across the empty waste, 
to hear in answer only the echo of our cry? 
Stifle it, says Matthew Arnold; there is no way 
out of our loneliness. The universe is silent, 
there is no help outside ourselves. We are 

iSheUey's Complete Poetical Works, p. 408. Boston, Houghton Mifflin 
Company. 1901. 



50 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

separated from the beyond by an unfathom- 
able sea across which comes neither sign nor 
sound. But if this is true, then life is a mock- 
ery. The noblest experiences of the soul — 
its faith, its hope, its love — become empty 
impressions to which no reality corresponds, 
and all our dearest aims are vain. George 
John Romanes, having felt it his duty to 
school himself into an attitude of pure skep- 
ticism, had the candor to admit that with his 
"virtual negation of God' 5 the universe for 
him "lost its soul of loveliness/' and human 
existence became a "lonely mystery," prompt- 
ing within him "the sharpest pang of which 
his nature was susceptible/' 1 

Every religion must prove itself by its abil- 
ity to answer the deepest cry of the human 
spirit. If it fails here, it fails everywhere; 
if it satisfies here, its existence is assured. 
Religion is not primarily for intellectual in- 
struction nor for moral direction. Secondarily 
it is both of these. The source of its being 
and the test of its value are to be found in 
its relation to the few fundamental needs of 
human life. These needs, as we have already 
seen, are spiritual. They have reference to 
the relation of man to the universe, the mean- 



1 Thoughts On Religion, p. 29. Chicago, The Open Court Publishing 
Company. 1902. 



DEMAND FOR A RELIGION 51 

ing of human conduct, and the goal of human 
destiny. No answer that is given to them 
can be put in definite terms, for life at best is 
a matter of faith, and all that can be asked of 
any religion is that it shall present certain be- 
liefs which being acted upon will satisfy the hu- 
man heart and help life upward toward its best. 
Herein lies the genius of Christianity. Chris- 
tianity is not presented as a system of philos- 
ophy aiming at the solution of theoretical 
problems. He who approaches it with this 
purpose in view may not be wholly dis- 
appointed; he has missed, however, the end 
for which it exists. Any religion, to be en- 
during, must rest upon a rational basis, but 
the test of a religion will be found in its ability 
to answer the deep-felt needs that spring out 
of our human constitution. Has Christianity 
met this test? Does it answer the deepest 
cravings of the human spirit? Does it satisfy 
the highest aspirations of the human soul? 
"My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth 
for thee." What has the Christian religion 
to say about the power outside ourselves? 
What help does it offer for moral failure? 
What light can it shed on suffering and death? 
We can live without an answer to the theoret- 
ical problems of life, but we cannot live with- 
out an answer to the vital problems. "Show 



52 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

us the Father, and it sufficeth us." Is there a 
hand to help, a heart to forgive, a fountain to 
cleanse the stain? "My soul thirsteth for thee, 
my flesh longeth for thee." What answer 
does Christianity give to this cry of the soul? 
God lives! As the ocean is round about its 
islands his life flows round his creatures. This 
is God's world, and we are the children of 
his care. If you doubt his goodness, read the 
story of Jesus. What he was during his brief 
stay among men, God is. Every word of his 
was a word of God — every deed was a deed 
of God. His love for men was a faint reflec- 
tion of the eternal love. Then fear not! What 
can separate us from the love of God? Naught 
but the blind folly of our own sin, which draws 
us away from the center of his care. Even 
then the solicitations of the eternal goodness 
are seeking to bring us back and heal the 
hurts that sin has made. 

Christianity does not profess to answer the 
speculative problems of life. It offers an 
answer to the cry of the soul's need. And 
what is that answer? In the words of Ter- 
tullian, "Faith knows no necessity" — words 
the truth of which was certified by one long 
before Tertullian, when he declared, "Thou 
hast been my help, and under the shadow of 
thy wings will I rest." 



CHAPTER IV 

JESUS CHRIST, THE ANSWER TO 
LIFE'S SUPREME DEMAND 

The life of Jesus of Nazareth is being sub- 
jected to-day to the severest criticism. Since 
the day Strauss and Renan first threw down 
the gauntlet to those who claimed that the 
sacred character of Jesus 5 life and work placed 
them beyond the range of critical examination, 
there has arisen a long list of Christian scholars 
who have maintained that the obligations of 
scientific intelligence require that the primary 
records of Christian faith shall bear the test 
of the most thorough investigation. There was 
a time when the conclusions reached by these 
thinkers could be scoffed out of court as the 
deliverances of heretics and destroyers; but 
that time is past. The scientific investigation 
of the New Testament records, together with 
the new light which archaeological findings 
have thrown upon New Testament times, have 
placed many of these conclusions beyond the 
range of question. Their forced acceptance 
has necessitated a reexamination of the founda- 

53 



54 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

tions upon which it was supposed for so long 
faith stood secure. 

For twenty centuries Christian thought has 
based the authority of Jesus upon certain 
external facts whose marvel was considered 
sufficient to justify his reputed claim to a 
unique place among the sons of men. Chief 
among these facts were the miracles he is 
said to have performed, and more especially 
the miracles of his entrance into and his de- 
parture from human life. With the progress 
of science the miracles of Jesus have become 
a difficulty to an increasing number of Chris- 
tian thinkers. They have made necessary for 
many what G. Stanley Hall has called "a 
double housekeeping and more or less dualiza- 
tion of mind." That is, they have required 
the separate maintenance of a world of science 
and a world of faith, which these Christians 
have found difficult to harmonize. It is not 
my object here to undertake an investigation 
of the gospel record concerning miracles. I 
only wish to suggest that the place of Jesus 
in history, and his claim upon the life of any 
age does not depend primarily upon belief or 
disbelief in wonders he may have performed. 

In early days signs and wonders were re- 
garded as the necessary evidence of divine 
power. All the great men of old attested their 



JESUS CHRIST THE ANSWER 55 

claim to be the representative of Deity by the 
performance of miracles. Without these mighty 
works their testimony would not be heard. 
This reliance upon wonders as the certain 
evidence of God's witness was peculiarly strong 
among the Jews, Their prophets had accredited 
themselves in this way. Not only so, but they 
had specified in their teaching that when the 
Messiah should appear this would be the 
sign by which he was to be known. It is 
significant that Jesus when he appeared sought 
to discourage marvels as the basis of his claim. 
Nevertheless, not only the multitude but also 
the disciples asked for a sign, and he found 
it necessary to accommodate himself to this 
demand. Otherwise his influence upon his own 
age would fail, and that influence was the 
fulcrum from which alone he could hope to 
move the world. 

Essential as the miracles of Jesus were to 
the first Christian centuries, the progress of 
time has lessened their evidential value. This 
change has been due not to the failure of 
faith but to the growth of faith. It indicates 
an awakening of the believers in Jesus to his 
own view of the nature of his life and work. 
Jesus' claim to our allegiance does not rest 
upon his ability to multiply loaves, to walk 
on the water, to raise the dead or be raised 



56 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

from the dead. It rests upon his ability to 
unite man with God, and thereby bring satis- 
faction to the deepest needs of human life. 
Signs were necessary one day just as the 
object lesson is necessary to the juvenile mind; 
but faith must pass from objects and dia- 
grams to principles before it can become an 
instrument of life. It may be that the unique- 
ness of Jesus' life once recognized will make 
it easier than not to accept his miracles as 
evidence; but unless a man has known the 
larger freedom, power, and fellowship which 
Jesus brought to life, that evidence will be 
valueless, and when he has known this it will 
become altogether secondary. 



That which distinguished Jesus among men 
was his sense of oneness with God. No one 
else had made this pretension and sustained 
it as he did before the world. "I came forth 
from the Father/' he said. "I and the Father 
are one." This characteristic distinguished 
both his life and teaching. In the times of 
severest trial he was self -composed through the 
consciousness that he was not alone, but his 
life was linked with another in which were 
limitless resources of strength and wisdom. 
This consciousness found voice continually in 



JESUS CHRIST THE ANSWER 57 

his words — indeed, it was the very message 
of his gospel. The training of the twelve as 
the first missionaries of a new religion had as 
its object the creation of a belief that they 
too were not alone, but were sharers in the 
purpose and interest of God. 

It has been the aim of all religious thought 
and effort to find a pathway to the presence 
of the Infinite. Before Jesus came men had 
looked for that presence chiefly in the world 
without. They sought the revelation of God 
in nature; they listened for his voice in the 
wind and by the sea. It is true the Hindoo 
had turned the search within. In his proverb, 
"Myself am God," we have a suggestion of the 
word of Jesus. But the self with the Hindoo 
was a sort of thing outside, and to find it and 
thus find God he must deny all that makes 
the self what it is. It w r as the merit of Jesus 
that he took the human soul, with all its de- 
sires and purposes, its passions and aims, and 
linked it with the eternal. He said: "Man is 
supremely God's child. In him, above all 
things else, the image of the eternal is revealed. 
In him God dwells, and through him he comes 
to self-consciousness." The destiny of man, 
therefore, is to live out the life of God in the 
soul. This is man's true, his higher nature. 

There can be no oneness in the sphere of 



58 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

personality that is not expressed in a union 
of will and spirit. The life of a person is the 
manifestation of a self, and the character of 
self-expression depends wholly upon the nature 
of the purpose by which the life is sustained. 
It is to be regretted that so often personality 
with us is at a minimum by reason of the lack 
of a principle of coordination; but so far as 
we are persons, life is the embodiment of 
purpose, and so far as we share the life of 
others we are sharers with them in a common 
aim. Henry Drummond's well-known case of 
the two students who had lived together in 
the closest friendship is significant here. The 
mental and moral reaction of each to any 
situation was found invariably to be the same. 
We share the life of God as we are sharers of 
the purpose of God. That purpose has been 
revealed through the ages. The nature of the 
eternal has not remained completely hidden 
from the mind of man. The history of the 
race is the story of the gradual revealing of 
the divine nature. The possibility of that 
revelation argues an essential kinship between 
the human and the divine, and a perfect life, 
if it were realized, becomes at once a declara- 
tion of what God is and what man ought to be. 
In Jesus that perfect life is manifest. In 
him all that mystics and seers through the 



JESUS CHRIST THE ANSWER 59 

ages have dimly and partially intuited is 
gathered up and embodied. In him the divine 
nature has not only been fully grasped, but he 
has dared to live it out before the world. Not 
only does Jesus claim oneness with God, but 
the character of his life is in complete har- 
mony with all that the finer spiritual discern- 
ment of man recognizes a divine life ought to 
be. Jesus does not base his claim to be the 
Son of God, therefore, upon the mere author- 
ity of his statement, "I and the Father are 
one," nor upon the reenforcement of that 
statement by marvelous works. The state- 
ment is, rather, the explanation of a manner 
of life men recognize to be divine. In him 
God is man and man is God. 

To be linked with another life is to have 
one's strength multiplied; and if that other 
life be the eternal, there are no limits to the 
range of possibility open to man. Many a 
weak and wavering soul has been sustained, 
and made capable of righteousness, simply by 
the love or friendship of another. Ambition 
has been stimulated, ideals created, and strength 
given to follow the lead of those ideals. The 
secret of life, says Robert Louis Stevenson, 
is juxtaposition. At the crossroads of acquaint- 
anceship we touch the determining point of 
our career. When we have stated union with 



60 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

God, therefore, we have opened up an infinite 
reach to human life. Not only is confidence 
established, through the conviction that one 
is in harmony with righteousness, with the 
power that grows out of that confidence, a 
power that enables one to face suffering with 
gladness and death without fear, but life de- 
rives a potency capable of deeds marvelous 
to the limited sphere of the child of earth. 
The power of the Father speaks through the 
child. Grant, therefore, Jesus' claim to one- 
ness with God, and you have provided the 
condition for the exercise of extraordinary 
power. 

II 

The question of the divinity of Jesus has 
been associated in many minds with the method 
of his entrance into the world. Grant the 
miraculous conception and divinity follows; 
deny it, and belief in divinity fails. It is 
unfortunate if the uniqueness of Jesus' nature 
is made dependent upon an event that is 
incidental, and which acquires its chief evi- 
dence from the fact it is made to sustain. 
Such a confusion can only be a cause of in- 
creasing difficulty to thoughtful Christians. 

It is far from my purpose to introduce here 
a discussion of the miraculous conception of 



JESUS CHRIST THE ANSWER 61 

Jesus. That doctrine is the endeavor of an 
age long gone to state a great and mysterious 
truth. The statement may be outworn, there- 
fore some are tempted to throw it away. Let 
us beware, however, lest we throw away also 
the truth which it represents. What is that 
truth? That Jesus is unique among men — 
unique in the consciousness of his relation to 
God, and therefore unique in his life and work. 
The mind of another age stated that truth 
by saying that he was born of the Spirit of 
God. That statement may have become 
awkward, but we should not allow its awkward- 
ness to silence our confession, "Truly this is 
the Son of God." 

The uniqueness of Jesus' life necessarily in- 
volved an apparent contradiction. His mission 
required that the divine life should be lived 
out within the limits and amid the conditions 
of imperfect men. This fact gives rise to 
strange contrasts in his character. In him 
weakness and strength, simplicity and wisdom, 
infirmity and majesty are strangely com- 
mingled. He shared our temptations as a 
friend and brother, yet he was sinless, and 
we go to him for help. He was a man of 
sorrows and acquainted with grief, yet his 
life was a triumph over pain and sorrow. The 
fathers of the church tried to state this dual 



62 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

character by declaring that he was Son of 
man and Son of God. He was one with men, 
yet he was more than a man. On the one 
hand, his humanity required that he should 
come into the world by human birth; on the 
other hand, such a life as his could be explained 
only as a creation of the Divine Spirit. Their 
statement, however, was secondary. It was 
an attempt to define a life recognized to be 
at once distinctively human, and yet essentially 
divine. The definition may fail, but the fact 
of the life remains, challenging our endeavor, 
and rebuking our refusal to give heed to its 
appeal. 

Ill 
We have only stated half the truth of Jesus' 
mission in the words, "I and the Father are 
one." Jesus did not stand in lofty isolation 
above the lives of men. What he was he 
asked his followers to be; what God was to 
him he declared he would be to every man. 
"That they may all be one; even as thou, 
Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they 
also may be in us." The same intimate filial 
relation that characterized his life was the 
privilege of every member of the human race. 
In the consciousness of that relation every 
man might find the answer to the deep needs 
of his life. 



JESUS CHRIST THE ANSWER 63 

As with Jesus, man's union with God may 
be defined in a twofold way: as a union of 
spirit and a union of will. The former he 
characterized by the term "faith/ 5 the latter 
by the term "service/' These are the two 
great words in the religion of Jesus. 

Faith is the constant experience of the life 
of God in the soul, a sense of relationship with 
the eternal. It is the conviction that God is, 
that he is with us, that he is with us to lead 
and help and heal. The God in whom we 
believe is the God we see in Jesus; therefore 
faith is belief in Jesus. Faith, then, is an 
experience. It is the misfortune of Christian 
history that this has not always been em- 
phasized. A few choice spirits in the early 
Christian days lived life in union with God 
and attempted to report their experience. The 
generations that followed took that report, 
formulated it into a system of belief, and 
substituted the statement for the experience 
itself. Then Christianity gradually became a 
body out of which the life had gone. Yet 
down across the centuries comes the first 
apostles' testimony, "Believe on the Lord 
Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." 

1. This faith saves from the limitations of 
finitude. Thereby the range of life is in- 
creased both extensively and intensively. Man 



64 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

is no longer shut in by the boundaries of time. 
He is a sharer of the life of the eternal. Death 
cannot harm him. He has that within him 
that transcends the power of change and death. 
Not only so, but through faith he finds a 
vocation that gives to his life a meaning and 
worth that are inestimable. Henceforth the 
goal of endeavor is that he shall measure toward 
the standard of Him in whom God dwelt com- 
plete. Character, as Jesus realized it, be- 
comes a value to be sought after supremely. 
"What shall it profit a man, if he gain the 
world, and lose his soul? Or what shall a man 
give in exchange for his soul?" 

And here we come upon the second term of 
Jesus' gospel. Life is so constituted that no 
one can win his soul alone. Man, as a child 
of God, is the member of a family, and wins 
the opportunity to a larger life in the service 
of his fellows. "He that loseth his life shall 
save it." Union with God is fellowship in 
work. Each shares with all in the divine 
purpose of creating a kingdom of individuals 
who will be partners in a life permeated and 
controlled by the divine will. The ministry 
of Jesus was the inauguration of that kingdom; 
it was also the evidence that ages of labor 
and sacrifice would be necessary for its con- 
summation. To win the kingdom Jesus must 



JESUS CHRIST THE ANSWER 65 

die; to become one with him in the life of God 
his followers become sharers with him in a 
process of redemption realized through the 
ministry of the cross. 

2. This faith saves from the hurts and ills 
of time. It has been said that the unchristian 
conduct of society to-day does not instance 
the failure of Christianity, for no serious at- 
tempt has yet been made to apply the prin- 
ciples of Jesus to social relations. This same 
claim might be made regarding one aspect at 
least of the life of the individual. The mass 
of men and women are weighed down and 
their happiness marred by fear and anxiety, 
prompted largely by ills of their own making. 
This should not be. Life in God is greater 
than all these things and need not fear because l jf f 
of them. Fear is the great enemy of man, 
and fear is only another name for lack of 
faith. Jesus often wept in the presence of 
anxiety and heartache, but his tears were tears 
of sympathy for the failure of faith. It was so 
difficult for his followers to learn the lesson he 
came to teach, that they could rise above life's 
ills. To his disciples he said: "Have faith in 
God. ... If ye have faith as a grain of mus- 
tard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Re- 
move hence to yonder place; and it shall re- 
move; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." 



66 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

We have poorly learned this lesson too. 
The haggard aspects of life — its pain, sorrow, 
misfortune, and disease — fill our souls with 
fear, when all that is needed is the venture 
of faith to prove that lif e is friendly and essen- 
tially trustworthy. Trust in God, with a clear 
sense of his aim for life, banishes fear as the 
morning sun scatters the dark. Who can 
separate us from the love of God? Can trib- 
ulation, or distress, or persecution, or trial, or 
nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all 
these things we are more than conquerors, 
for through them the real treasures of life are 
won. He that has found God has found a 
source of contentment; there is no fear for 
him who realizes that the eternal God is our 
refuge, and underneath are the everlasting 
arms. 

3. This faith saves from the guilt and power 
of sin. Sin is primarily separation from God. 
It is indifference to and rebellion against the 
will of God. It is following the momentary 
particular interest, as opposed to the appeal 
of a larger good. To be saved from sin a man 
must be drawn away from obedience to narrow 
self-interest into devotion to the law of the 
larger life. He becomes ready to sacrifice 
present impulse to reason, the gratification of 
the moment to future realization, individual 



JESUS CHRIST THE ANSWER 67 

gain to the welfare of the common life. Faith 
accomplishes this change. As the act of com- 
ing into conscious union with God, faith begins 
a process of transformation in character that 
is destined to terminate in righteousness. The 
will is the spring of action. When the will 
becomes right it tends to righten the whole 
life. Sin may have wrought permanent physical 
injury, but a change of will has in it the prom- 
ise of rebirth in character. Not only so, but 
the life of God in the soul makes available 
to man the resources of the Infinite. The will 
of man is energized and made capable of an 
attainment otherwise impossible. Jesus stated 
this fact under the allegory of the vine and 
the branches. "Abide in me, and I in you. 
As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except 
it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except 
ye abide in me." Jesus is the world's Re- 
deemer, for it is through him that man is 
drawn away from his sin into union with the 
eternal. He has taught man to hate his sin. 
He banished the cloud of guilt from the human 
soul when he said, "It is not the will of your 
Father . , . that one of these little ones should 
perish." He struck new courage into man's 
heart when he declared that God is ever 
laboring and suffering for his wayward chil- 
dren's sake. Through faith in him souls have 



68 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

gone from darkness to light, from the power of 
sin and death to the power of the Spirit and 
life. Dead unto sin, they have become alive 
unto God through Jesus Christ. 

I may not be able to satisfy my under- 
standing concerning the marvels recorded in the 
Gospels about Jesus, but this I know*: when I 
come into his presence I see one who has made 
God known to me; I see one who reveals to 
me what a man ought to be; I learn that my 
life may be lived in union with the Eternal, 
and that when thus lived it wins a power that 
enables it to rise above trouble, sorrow, death, 
and sin. This is enough. I bow before him 
and lift up my prayer that he will give me 
faith to follow him and grace to become day 
by day more like him. 



CHAPTER V 

HISTORY'S TESTIMONY TO JESUS' 
CLAIM 

There is nothing more unique in the minis- 
try of Jesus than the claims he made con- 
cerning his own life and person. Other teachers 
have given a system of truth; Jesus offered 
himself as the perfect embodiment of the 
truth, and, setting out from his own experience 
and person, all that he said was a charac- 
terization of himself. "I am the bread of life 
— I am the water of life — I am the resurrec- 
tion and the life — I am the way and the truth 
and the life — I am the light of the world." 
These are some of the claims about which he 
built the framework of his gospel, and among 
them there is none more significant than the 
latter, "I am the light of the world." 

The significance of this claim lay in its 
prophetic character. The truth of some state- 
ments is self-evident; it matters not by whom 
they are spoken; the words carry with them 
the inevitable testimony of truth. Other 
statements are made on the ground of possi- 
ble evidence. Having heard, we proceed to 

69 



70 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

gather from history and experience the proof 
we need. The whole is greater than its part 
— this is a self-evident truth. In the same 
conditions the same cause will produce the 
same effect — this is a statement based on the 
testimony of experience. But here is a state- 
ment with no other certificate than the au- 
thority of the speaker, for this Man is making 
a claim concerning himself, and as yet he has 
had little influence in the world. He is prac- 
tically unknown, his teaching is unheard, his 
mission is misunderstood. His statement is 
therefore prophetic; only the future could 
vindicate this Man's claim to be the light of 
the world. 

The claim is significant also because of the 
character of the analogy employed. No ele- 
ment in nature possesses a greater significance 
than light. Like a mantle of blessing, light 
falls upon our world, bringing life and growth 
and beauty. With the ancients light was a 
sacred thing; it was associated with all that 
is highest and best. It was the synonym of 
life, the symbol of moral excellence, the garment 
of the eternal. Modern science has served to 
deepen the mystery of light, and to give to the 
term a larger meaning. It shows that this ele- 
ment fulfills a threefold function, each division 
of which is vital to the well-being of the race. 



TESTIMONY TO JESUS' CLAIM 71 

1. Light is the source of power in the natural 
world. The coal in the mine, the electric 
current in the wire, the energy that drives 
the factory, the force in animal and vegetable 
life — all these are variations of solar energy. 
Like a mighty dynamo hitched to our planet 
by wires called sunbeams, the sun is feeding 
the multiform machinery of earth with power. 

2. Light is the condition of life and growth. 
Sunshine is a metallic shower, that bathes us 
with vaporized metals and gases. Nothing 
grows without it. The nude races, who re- 
ceive the sun's rays unobstructed, are endowed 
with extraordinary strength and endurance. 
When Kitchener was with his army in the 
Soudan his men were taken with cholera, and 
did not respond to the use of medicine; he 
ordered them to strip and lie in the sun, "for," 
said he, "I believe that the sun can reach these 
germs of disease which we cannot reach," and 
the results practically justified his claim. It 
is the sun that stores the grain and fruit with 
those elements that sustain animal life. This 
is the perpetual miracle of the ages, the mys- 
tery of growth. The seed unfolds in stalk 
and flower and fruit; the acorn rises in the 
forest; forever the multitudinous forms of 
earth are reaching upward and outward toward 
their perfecting; where is the secret of it all? 



72 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

In the sun. Where the sun shines there is 
life; where darkness comes there is death. 

3. Light is the source of the world's illumina- 
tion; it is the counterpart of vision; by means 
of it we find our way. It touches the face of 
nature with grace and beauty. 

The present glory of this claim of Jesus 
lies in the fact that these three points of anal- 
ogy are applicable to him in his relation to 
men; that he who said two thousand years 
ago, "I am the light of the world/' has shone 
like a sun on the centuries, lending to them 
life and power and illumination. 



Jesus is the inspiration of modern civilization; 
he has given the impulse to all those achieve- 
ments that are the glory of modern society. 

The history of civilization is the record of 
man's struggle for freedom. Life in early 
times was servitude; man was a slave — a 
slave to his fellows, a slave to ignorance, a 
slave to circumstance. This condition was 
manifest in the entire organization of society. 
Politically, the mass of the people were serfs 
whose task was to do the arbitrary will of 
some overlord; morally, ignorance had cast 
its shadow over the soul, trailing after it that 
great brood of vices that blackened the face 



TESTIMONY TO JESUS' CLAIM 73 

of life in early times; religion was a discipline 
of fear, by which man sought to win the good 
will of powers he conceived as hostile to him- 
self; suffering, disease, and death walked up 
and down the earth, with none to check their 
ravages or strip them of their power. Human 
life in itself is inherently bondage. Wherever 
we look we are face to face with objects and 
forces which set themselves in opposition to 
us and declare we must submit. Look within, 
the life of passion and impulse tyrannizes over 
us; look without, we are subject to the world 
of nature and circumstance. Drought blights 
our crops, circumstance wrecks our plans, mis- 
fortune ruins our happiness. The goal of hu- 
man effort is to rise superior to these opposi- 
tions, not so much to conquer them as to make 
them our friends. Man's task in life is to 
gain control of himself and of his world. 

Although the early centuries in history 
accomplished much that was great and good, 
in this, the central task of life, they signally 
failed. Three great civilizations arose before 
the time of Jesus, were put to the test, and 
proved themselves a failure. Despite their 
achievements, it must be confessed that they 
missed the key to the problem of life. The 
Hebrew nation is one of the miracles of his- 
tory. Born in the desert and cradled in servi- 



74 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

tude, this people, under the leadership of their 
prophets, separated themselves from the idol- 
atrous peoples of the earth and laid the founda- 
tions of a social and ethical order that will 
abide forever. Although only a handful, they 
stood for centuries unmoved amid the empires 
of the earth. But Hebrew civilization fell 
short of its goal. It was narrow and exclusive, 
it lacked that spirit that makes for permanence 
in the life of a nation. Truth hardened into 
tradition, religion lost its meaning, righteous- 
ness became a name, and as a people the 
Hebrews passed from the face of the earth. 

Greece is one of the world's greatest bene- 
factors. She gave to the world art, philosophy, 
and literature. No nation has produced so 
many great minds who enriched human life 
with their thought. But the speculations of 
the Greek sages passed above the heads of 
the people, powerless to prevent their corrup- 
tion and the darkness of moral failure. Rome, 
too, was great. She led her armies to the con- 
quest of the world and established a mighty 
empire. But she lacked the direction of a 
great moral impulse, and as a result life lost 
its purpose and was weakened by vice. The 
poor were enslaved, labor was despised, the 
rights of the weak were ignored, suicide was 
praised. Rome did some great things, but 



TESTIMONY TO JESUS' CLAIM 75 

she lacked the inspiration necessary to an 
abiding civilization. 

Then one day a Child was born in Palestine. 
He grew up in obscurity in his little Galilsean 
town. When he came to manhood, he went 
down to the Jordan and was baptized by one 
John the Baptist, and certain evidences were 
given that marked him as a divine leader 
among men. Then he gathered about him a 
group of disciples and began to teach them. 
He taught them a great prayer; it read like 
this: "Our Father which art in heaven, hal- 
lowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. 
Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. 
Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us 
our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead 
us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." 

Here was the key the world needed. Here 
were certain truths destined to give a new 
meaning to human life, namely, the father- 
hood of God, the brotherhood of man, that 
faith is the principle by which the world may 
be overcome, that love is the principle that 
sweetens life. Then he set himself to exem- 
plify these teachings. For three years he lived 
a life of faith toward God and love toward 
men, realizing in himself the reality of his 
teaching. Then he entered Gethsemane, to 
show how man may conquer circumstance; 



76 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

he climbed Calvary, and came out by way of 
the tomb to show that life is lord of death. 
A new age began. Certain great conceptions 
began to find their way into men's minds 
and to affect the whole of life. They said, 
"If man is God's child, then life is a sacred 
thing; these gladiatorial games must go; child- 
life must be protected and nurtured; the aged 
must be cared for/' This gave birth to the 
church, the hospital, and the school. They 
said, "If God is the Father of all, then all men 
are brethren." What a mighty stream of 
results flowed from this conception! The 
missionary set out to carry the evangel of 
God's love to the ends of the earth; the slave 
was emancipated; political democracy rose 
like a star of hope in men's hearts, bringing 
the promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity. 
They said, if man is God's child, misfortune, 
disease, and death have a place in the divine 
discipline of life, and nothing can separate us 
from the love of God. A new spirit took pos- 
session of men. Life took on a fresh meaning. 
The soul now had a high task before it, and 
with courage and hope men set themselves to 
realize the program of their Master's life. 

This is what Jesus is doing. He is helping 
men and women bear their disappointments and 
overcome their temptations. He is removing 



TESTIMONY TO JESUS' CLAIM 77 

the burden from the oppressed and lifting up 
the downtrodden. He is making men brothers. 
He is making the ends of the earth neighbors. 
He is making life everywhere sweeter and 
people happier. He is leading forward currents 
of reform and renewal. He is their inspira- 
tion, he gives them direction. "I am the 
light of the world." 

II 

Jesus Christ has furnished the conditions of 
moral and spiritual growth; he is the "sun of 
righteousness." Growth is God's perpetual 
miracle, by which he unfolds before us un- 
ceasingly the majesty and mystery of life. 
This question of miracle is one that has been 
greatly confused. We have insisted on restrict- 
ing the term to the extraordinary and unac- 
countable, and have trained ourselves to look 
for God in the capricious, thereby robbing our 
common life of the beauty of its divine meaning. 
If we were to stand out on the hillside to-day, 
and suddenly a plant should rise out of the 
earth and unfold in stalk and flower and fruit, 
we would say: "A miracle! God is in this 
place." But if we plant a seed in the garden, 
and to-morrow two green leaves appear, and 
in their time the flower and fruit, we forget 
that God is there, and that the rare happening 



78 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

when it occurs is necessary only because we 
do forget. When we study the science of 
growth we notice that two factors are in- 
volved: the life-impulse and suitable condi- 
tions. Plant a seed: for growth there must be 
first, a principle of life, then, moisture, sunlight, 
and warmth. Plant a stone, you may have 
the most suitable conditions, yet it will be 
nothing else; plant a seed, but with conditions 
of drought and chill there can be no growth. 
The same is true in these human lives of ours. 
For growth toward manhood and womanhood 
two factors are involved: there must be the 
life-impulse and there must be a suitable 
atmosphere. God has planted in us the life- 
impulse; it belongs to our nature as human 
beings. Every soul born into the world is a 
seed of divine life planted in the fields of time. 
In the morning of creation God said, "Let us 
make man in our image, after our likeness." 

We all have in us the possibility of the divine 
likeness. All that is needed is a proper atmos- 
phere for its development. Plant a soul in 
the heart of Africa, where the light has not 
shined, and it will grow up pagan. Plant a 
soul in the slums of the modern city, where 
the light has been smothered beneath the 
shadow of sin and vice, and it will be none the 
less pagan. Plant a soul amid conditions of 



TESTIMONY TO JESUS' CLAIM 79 

abject toil, in childhood, robbed of the tender 
care of a fostering love; in boyhood, of oppor- 
tunities for mental and moral improvement; in 
manhood, doomed to tramp the treadmill of 
an unending, distasteful, uninteresting task, 
and it grows up reprobate in mind and heart. 
The more I study some phases of our indus- 
trial life, the less I wonder that so many of 
our working people present such an unlovely 
spectacle. Fortunate you are if you love your 
work; if it is yours, if it inspires your interest, 
it will be easy to be good and happy. But 
if your task is forced on you by the pressure 
of necessity, if it is not yours, and you have 
no other ambition than to get it done, a burden 
from which death alone can free you, it will 
crush the joy out of your heart and the light 
from your life, 

Now, Jesus came to create conditions fav- 
orable to the development of the true type 
of manhood. He is the "Sun of Righteousness," 
that is, he provides the conditions necessary 
for the production of righteous character. He 
came to bring light to the heart of Africa, 
to bring cleansing to moral slums, to create 
in the world a new social order in which moral 
and physical servitude will not exist, and 
which shall lift from men the burden of de- 
grading toil. Thank God, he is accomplish- 



80 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

ing his end, the light has not shined in vain. 
Africa and the islands of the sea are being 
reclaimed. There is growing among Chris- 
tian peoples an awakened social consciousness 
that the slum and the gutter are a moral in- 
justice. Under the constraint of the Master's 
spirit men will one day learn to love each 
other and to work for the common good. It 
is true the light is not yet fully risen. When 
the seventh annual report of the chief of the 
Children's Bureau tells us that in 47 factories 
visited in one State in 1918, 430 children under 
twelve years old were employed; that in 205 
canneries in another State 721 children under 
fourteen were found, fifty of them being under 
ten; when the secretary of the Child Labor Com- 
mission declares that one million children under 
sixteen are laboring in our industries, that is, 
one million children deprived of the chance 
of physical, mental, and moral development, 
doomed to a life of ignorance, wretchedness, 
and sin, the force of this comes to us. But 
the existence of such conditions is not an 
arraignment of Jesus Christ: it is an arraign- 
ment of our human weakness. No one of us 
doubts that if the principles Jesus taught were 
put into effect, and the spirit Jesus showed 
was exemplified among men, a new age of 
good will and gladness would dawn, and so 



TESTIMONY TO JESUS' CLAIM 81 

far as society is filled with light and peace it 
is drawn from him. 

Ill 

Again, it must not be forgotten that growth 
toward moral excellence is determined by an 
ideal. This is so true as to be almost a plat- 
itude. For the moral education of a boy 
there must be some hero who exemplifies the 
grace or characteristic desired; this stimulates 
and directs his moral development. For un- 
limited growth in life there must be a perfect 
example in which are combined all the graces 
and virtues of character. 

This is one of the chief merits of the appear- 
ance of Jesus Christ among men. There is a 
story from the life of the great Italian painter, 
Michael Angelo. When he was a youth he 
was bidden to paint a picture described by 
his teacher, but the more faithfully he tried 
the more signal was his failure. Finally the 
teacher took a crayon and sketched the rough 
outline of his thought and asked the youth 
to return to his task. Angelo seized the brush 
and soon filled in the outline in perfect accord 
with the teacher's idea. This story is true of 
the higher art of life. With master hand Jesus 
has sketched the outline of the perfect life, 
and then has bidden us out of the materials 



82 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

of the days to complete his idea. Our success 
depends upon our following with care the com- 
pleted form of his outline. 

What virtue was not supremely perfect in 
him? What heroism! What moral courage! 
What victory over difficulty! What calmness 
and confidence! In the darkest hour he saw 
the stars shining on the path, he felt that God 
was near and the gate of hope open. Other 
names are great, but to whom can we liken 
the Man of Galilee? In his matchless poem, 
"The Crystal," Sydney Lanier makes a survey 
of the prominent names of history — Homer, 
Socrates, Dante, Milton, Keats, and Emerson. 
He finds in each certain qualities of excellence, 
but in every case mingled with some fleck or 
flaw. He concludes his estimate with these 
words in reference to Jesus: 

"But thee, but thee, O sovereign seer of time, 
But thee, O poet's poet, wisdom's tongue, 
But thee, O man's best man, O love's best love, 
O perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
O all men's comrade, servant, king, or priest — 
What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, 
What least defect or shadow of defect, 
What rumor, tattled by an enemy, 
Of inference loose, what lack of grace 
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's — 
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in thee, 
Jesus, good paragon, thou crystal Christ?" 1 

1 The Poems of Sydney Lanier '. New York, Charles Scribner'a Sons. 1906, 



TESTIMONY TO JESUS' CLAIM 83 

Who can measure the influence of this ex- 
ample among men? The saints and mystics 
that have been his imitators, the nameless 
millions who have striven to follow him and 
have found the way home. The task of Chris- 
tian experience to-day is to give allegiance 
to this ideal, to treasure in the soul this su- 
preme model, to be able to say with Paul, 
"For me to live is Christ." 

Not only did Jesus present an ideal for the 
individual life; he presented one also for social 
effort. He painted on the canvas of the sky 
the picture of a kingdom, toward which he 
bade men turn their hearts and direct their 
endeavor. Through the centuries the efforts 
of philanthropist and teacher, economist and 
reformer have found their inspiration here. 
We to-day, like the prophet of long ago, are 
looking forward to the time when peace and 
good will will reign, and the well-being of all 
will be fostered, and we think of that day in 
terms of Jesus' conception of the kingdom. 
Like the Star of the East, this has been lead- 
ing the generations across the desert toward 
the City of God. 

"He that followeth me shall not walk in 
darkness, but shall have the light of life. 93 
"The light of life' 5 — there is something im- 
pressive in the words. This journey of life 



84 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

is a treacherous way, through forest and 
desert, over mountain and stormy sea, a way 
over which we have not gone before, and 
which is therefore unknown. Unless we can 
get light upon a few outstanding questions we 
are indeed wanderers. There are three words 
on which we must have light: "duty," 
"destiny/ 5 and "God." What are we to be- 
lieve? What are we to be? What are we to 
do? Nature, philosophy, and history are all 
silent regarding these questions. Jesus alone 
answers them. What are we to believe? Be- 
lieve that God is your Father, that he is ever 
near, that he is working with you and for you. 
What are we to be? Be what I am. What 
are we to do? Follow me. And so amid the 
round of daily cares we follow on, knowing 
that he who spake two thousand years ago 
has proven his words true when he said, "I 
am the light of the world: he that followeth 
me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have 
the light of life." 



CHAPTER VI 
THE PROBLEM OP EVIL 

In June, 1904, a somewhat remarkable 
book was published by the Rev. Byron Palmer, 
of Ashtabula, Ohio, entitled God's White Throne, 
or A Defense of Divine Wisdom and Goodness 
in the Dark Things of the World and Life. This 
book was unique, not so much by reason of 
its contents as because of its relation to the 
author. Soon after leaving school, and just 
as he was beginning the Christian ministry, 
this man was stricken with an incurable 
disease, a slow process of ossification. First 
his limbs became useless, then one arm, one 
eye, and finally the spine was attacked. For 
years he spent twelve hours in bed and twelve 
hours in a wheel chair, while his wife taught 
school to support the home. Now he has 
himself wheeled up to the desk, that with the 
remaining arm and the dim light of the re- 
maining eye, he may write this book justify- 
ing the ways of God with men. 

In the introduction Mr. Palmer says: "When 
at last came the ordeal of being shut away 
from the world, and of leaving my life's work, 

85 



86 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

and of being compelled to accept the life and 
the lot of a daily sufferer, my mind naturally 
turned to the problems which experience had 
made uppermost in my daily meditation. It 
became necessary for me to seek and find a 
satisfactory solution of, not only the problem 
of personal suffering, but of the larger prob- 
lems of human life and destiny, of the apparent 
misadjustments in the world, of the seeming 
contradictions in the course of Providence, of 
the absence of order in divine government, 
and the apparent defeat of righteousness and 
truth in the world/' 1 

The question voiced in these words is ages 
old: How shall we retain belief in the being 
and rule of God in face of suffering and other 
forms of evil? This difficult problem con- 
stitutes a shadow that has rested upon the 
intellectual history of the human race. It is 
the everlasting "Why?" Under its pressure 
human hearts in every generation have been 
driven to pessimism and despair. In the 
attempt to solve it man's genius has risen to 
its greatest height. 

It is the fatal charge against materialism 
and the doctrine of the negation of evil that 
they fail to provide a ground for a practical 



1 Byron Palmer, God's White Throne, Cincinnati, The Methodist Book 
Concern, 1904? 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 87 

optimism. No theory of evil is either possible 
or satisfactory except on a pragmatic basis. 
Centuries of reflection have proven that the 
theoretical aspect of the problem cannot be 
solved; yet man must live amid conditions of 
evil and find life not only tolerable but de- 
sirable. Nothing is more evident than the 
tendency of men to lapse into pessimism and 
despair when they lose their faith in the wis- 
dom and the righteousness of things. We 
cannot hope to explain why the world is as 
it is, why man is constituted as he is; but 
we must preserve our belief that the world 
is wisely ordered and that human life is of 
worth. To save faith in the goodness of God 
and the desirability of life, some explanation 
is demanded. 

It is the merit of the answer of the illustrious 
sufferer in God's White Throne, that, like Job 
of old, he has retained his faith in the worth 
of human life. He does not rebel against the 
lot that has fallen to him. He does not com- 
plain against divine justice. He does not 
cry out, like Petronius in Sienkiewicz' Quo 
Vadis, "Weakness cometh; it is better that 
I depart." He does not steel himself into an 
attitude of stoical indifference, declaring that 
he will despise these things even while they 
overcome him. He asserts that this is God's 



88 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

world, and that he governs it in the interest 
of a moral and spiritual order. Virtue, holi- 
ness, patience, love, are the fruit he seeks. 
Life's evils are the method of discipline 
necessary to the production of this result. 
They who follow the devious path up through 
darkness to light alone are life's victors. 



Life's discipline is necessary because man is 
what he is. He is not a mere mechanism; 
he is a conscious being. He grows by exercise; 
he learns by doing. Exercise we know is the 
great thing in muscle-making. It is the man 
under strenuous physical discipline that de- 
velops physique. The pioneers of our land 
of two centuries ago were a sturdier stock 
than the men of to-day, because life for them 
meant warfare. They must kill the wild 
beasts that preyed upon them; they must 
clear away the forest and plow the fallow 
ground if they would eat bread. Physical 
hardships made them strong. The mothers of 
that day knew nothing of the weakness and 
suffering of the women of to-day. 

And exercise is the great thing in character- 
making. Character is strengthened by exert- 
ing the will along the line of a resolution. 
Character, said Novalis, is a completely fash- 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 89 

ioned will; that is, a will that always takes 
the path of the ought. It makes us stronger 
to do something each day merely because we 
ought to do it; and to feel what we ought to 
do and yet pass it by, deals a blow to will- 
power. So common a thing as lying in bed 
in the morning when we know we ought to 
get up weakens character. On the other hand, 
to face difficulty with the determination to 
overcome it develops strength. It is well for 
us that we do not have the control of our 
lives wholly in our own hands. We would 
choose the path of ease, and ease is not good. 
To safeguard against this mistake we are 
placed amid conditions that require of us 
constant struggle and sacrifice. No good of 
life is bought without its price. The treasures 
of earth must be wrought for, its jewels digged, 
its fields cleared, its forests reclaimed. Only 
amid scenes of sorrow and failure are mental 
and moral stability attained. We do not know 
what is best; it is well that necessity drives 
us forward, while the heart teaches us to trust 
that the way is good. 

II 

The thought of life's discipline offers a key 
to the nature of evil. A popular way of dis- 
posing of this problem has been to refer it to 



90 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

the devil. He is the author of darkness; an 
infinite demon is at work among men whose 
mischief makes misery; a rival power is in 
the world which in conflict with God at times 
seems to outdo him. It is only fair to notice 
that this teaching is not essentially Christian, 
but it has come down to us from a pre-Chris- 
tian age. Zoroaster, twelve centuries before 
Christ, to escape making God responsible for 
evil, conceived of a dual principle giving birth 
to two brothers, the power of good and the 
power of evil. This dualism was taken over 
by the Jews of the Babylonish captivity. 
"There is no evidence," says John Fiske, 
"that the Jews previous to the Babylonish 
captivity possessed the conception of a devil 
as the author of evil." 1 The later Jews ascribed 
to Satan all the ills of life. From Judaism 
this conception passed into Christianity, and 
gradually took form as an established doctrine. 
Such a doctrine, however, strikes at divine 
sovereignty; it gives us a universe divided 
against itself, and therefore the thinking world 
to-day is rapidly abandoning it. 

1. From the standpoint of the physical 
order, what we call evil is natural consequence. 
It is a necessary result in a universe, that is 



ijohn Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers, p. 122. Boston, Houghton 
Mifflin Company. 1900. 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 91 

in a world a perfect ordered system, that 
infringement on the rights of that order should 
bring disharmony. To be out of order is not 
pleasant; it means conflict; it means suffering. 
It is a part of the nature of things that disease 
should follow impure living, and that calam- 
ity should result from breaking across the path 
of law. These things are not the works of 
an evil one, they are the natural consequences 
of an ordered world, and it is the task of 
modern civilization to eliminate them by 
establishing life in harmony with God's law. 

Pain is hard to bear, but it is not the worst 
thing in the world. It is a beneficent agent 
of God's goodness. It is nature's warning 
that the course we are taking is destructive, 
and without it the race would extinguish itself. 
Pain is the life-principle asserting itself against 
that which would overcome it. When a man 
suffers, his suffering is the result of the struggle 
of life to maintain itself. Bodily life implies 
sensation, and sensation means enjoyment 
when all the functions of life work normally, 
and suffering when they are obstructed. 

2. From the standpoint of the moral order, 
evil is sin, and sin has its origin in the human 
will. It is rebellion against the wiH of God. 
By the will of God we mean those moral re- 
quirements which in their relation to the 



92 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

individual and to society make the fullest 
life possible. That we should be free spiritual 
agents is the purpose of creation. But the 
gift of freedom implies the possibility of sin. 
In balancing between powers and passions, 
principles and appetites, it is possible for us 
to choose the lower rather than the higher, 
self-interest instead of sympathy, love, and 
honor. It is because we choose the lower, 
contrary to God's will, that moral blight and 
calamity fall upon human life, for the wages 
of sin is death. 

3. But you say: "What of those calamities 
that fall upon life unexpected and undeserved? 
What of the righteous who suffer while the 
wicked prosper?" This was the problem that 
faced the writer of the book of Job: why should 
a good man suffer? While not attempting to 
defend the justice of calamity or of undeserved 
pain, it may be noted that both have served 
a moral purpose. First, it is quite evident 
that if reward was always apportioned accord- 
ing to desert, there would be scant oppor- 
tunity for the production of unselfishness, 
which is the very life of character. And, 
secondly, the social constitution of human life 
is such that many are involved in the mistakes 
of one. No man liveth or dieth unto himself. 
Those ties called heredity, proximity, respon- 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 93 

sibility, are often instrumental in throwing 
upon the innocent suffering for others' sin. 
But in such vicarious pain life finds its heal- 
ing. To love is to suffer, but in the suffering 
of love life is reborn to better things. The 
world lives by the vicarious sacrifice of love 
and innocence. 

The pain side of life then serves not only 
a physical but a moral purpose. Sickness has 
taught men divine lessons; death is one of 
the mightiest educators of the race. Sadness 
is the mother of tenderness; patience and hope 
are born of difficulty and disappointment. 
Without pain we could never learn the mean- 
ing of sympathy, nor attain the will to sacri- 
fice. Our own burdens and woundings give us 
a sensibility to others' needs. The experience 
of pain — in sickness and sorrow, disappoint- 
ment and difficulty, danger and defeat — is 
the matrix out of which are begotten all those 
other-regarding graces that give to life its 
charm. 

Even the sin of man has become a condi- 
tion for accomplishing good, for here the sac- 
rifice of self-giving has reached its height. 
The possibility of healing from sin is meas- 
ured by man's ability to suffer for others' 
sake. In the cross of Christ this truth has 
been manifest, and as men have accepted it 



94 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

and devoted themselves to it they have been 
trained to goodness and brought into fellow- 
ship with the eternal. They have found a 
motive for bearing pain with gladness as 
heroes and martyrs, believing they were "filling 
up their part of the sufferings of Christ/' 

III 

It would seem, then, that those things called 
evils are in great part the result of the check 
and correction of God's teachers, and are in- 
tended for our good. Every trial has its 
compensation. This is true even of that form 
of testing that results in sin. "Count it all 
joy," says the apostle, "when you fall into 
manifold temptations; knowing that the proof 
of your faith worketh patience." It is not 
enough that man should have the power to 
choose the wrong; life is presenting constant 
invitations to make the wrong choice. Thus 
his power is tested. The possibility of character 
implies freedom, and freedom is real only 
when it grapples with opposition. Further- 
more, the possibility of character implies that 
our world is in the making. A finished world 
would not be a favorable environment for the 
development of moral beings. The unbeliever 
has made the apparent imperfections in our 
world a ground for his opposition to the claim 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 95 

that wisdom and goodness are at the heart 
of things. Given a chance, he would create 
a better world than this. But, alas! he has 
failed to interpret life in moral terms, or he 
would have seen that ours is the best possible 
world for the production of that which reveals 
itself as the purpose of creation. 

The justification of this view of the evils of 
life is found in the almost inexhaustible supply 
of illustration presented in every sphere of 
observation. In nature the elements, if left 
to themselves, tend to stagnate into pestilence, 
but the storm comes to stir them again to 
health and sweetness. History teaches that those 
races out of whose life have come the divinest 
revelations of thought, energy, and faith have 
been located amid rocky mountains and barren 
deserts or beside roaring seas, where acquaint- 
ance with hardship has created courage, and 
the presence of immensity has awakened a 
sense of the eternal. The prophet of the Old 
Testament sums up the record of a people's 
misfortune in the words: "Thou shalt remem- 
ber all the way which the Lord thy God has 
led thee these forty years in the wilderness, 
to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know 
what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldst 
keep his commandments, or no/' From Jacob 
and David to John and Paul, the spiritual 



96 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

genius of Scripture finds its source in dark- 
ness and desolation. Many of the greatest 
masterpieces in modern literature and art 
were born out of bereavement and cradled by 
the hand of infirmity. The noblest visions of 
the soul are evoked by hardship, like incense 
touched with fire. They say that there is a 
flower in South America that blooms only 
when the wind blows hard. It is a species 
of cactus. On the stem are little lumps which 
being smitten by the strong wind burst into 
bloom. So is it in our lives. 

"We look before and after, 
And pine for what is not; 
Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught; 
Our sweetest songs are those 
That tell of saddest thought." 1 

What, then, is the lesson of it all? This 
is God's world. It is not a realm divided against 
itself. God has created the world and is 
determining it every day. The conditions 
governing that creation are ordained by him, 
and they are the best possible conditions for 
accomplishing their appointed end. That end 
is the production of character — his own self- 
revelation in his children. The fact of creation 
cannot be divorced from the idea of worth. 



1 Shelley's Complete Poetical Works. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company. 
1901. Poem, "To a Skylark." 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 97 

1. The production of character requires cir- 
cumstances of struggle, disappointment, and 
care, for only amid these conditions are those 
qualities developed which life teaches us to 
regard as of permanent worth, 2. Each indi- 
vidual is a creator, and living in a world the 
plan of which is not fully revealed, he will 
mistake for good that which is worthless, or 
even injurious, and in the exercise of free- 
dom ofttimes be tempted into paths of rebel- 
lion. 

This answer is not intended to silence all 
puzzles involved in the problem of evil. Our 
knowledge at best is exceedingly fragmentary 
and imperfect. But if we could stand at the 
center of things, and see life in its complete- 
ness, we would doubtless find that the shadow 
of evil is cast by the presence of good. 

Then let us take heart since Divine Love 
reigns. Man may have sinned, but with his 
sin his redemption has come. Sin is not a 
trifling thing, and persisted in it can result 
only in disaster for the transgressor; but it is 
not the Father's will that one of the least of 
these little ones shall perish. The goal toward 
which God works is the establishment of 
harmony throughout all his kingdom. Fear 
not but that this end will ultimately be accom- 
plished. The mountains may depart and the 



98 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

hills be removed, but the kingdom of love shall 
not fail of its purpose until the 

"... one far-off divine event 
Toward which the whole creation moves" 

is realized. 

"Take heart! the Waster builds again — 
A charmed life old Goodness hath; 
The tares may perish, but the grain 

Is not for death. 
God works in all things; all ooey 

His first propulsion from the night: 
Wake thou and watch! the world is gray 
With morning light!" 1 



*W hittier's Complete Works. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company. 1894. 
Poem, "The Reformer." 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PROBLEM OP FREEDOM 

There is no greater word in our language 
than the term "freedom." For the idea which 
it represents men have been ready to sacrifice 
themselves in every age. It is the desire of 
every heart and the ideal of every people. 
And yet, strangely enough, no word in our 
language has been so persistently misunder- 
stood. Jesus aroused the indignation of the 
Jew of the first century by offering to point 
him the way to freedom. "We be Abraham's 
seed, and were never in bondage to any man: 
how sayest thou, Ye shall be free?" The 
spirit of the twentieth century evidences no 
better understanding of the nature and means 
of attainment of that which Jesus offered to 
the Jew. 



It has been the common judgment of man 
that the bondage of life is due to external 
conditions, and therefore freedom is to be 
found in independence. This judgment has 
prompted his endeavor to escape the domina- 

99 



100 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

tion of nature and the empire of his fellows. 
Under its inspiration the foundations of civ- 
ilization have been laid, with the advance- 
ment of knowledge and the growth of democ- 
racy. But while this judgment has vastly 
increased the range of life, it is only partially 
true. Freedom is impossible so long as ig- 
norance leaves man a prey to the forces of 
nature, or tyranny holds him in servitude. 
But emancipation from these powers still 
leaves unanswered the question, Who shall a 
man's master be? One may have accom- 
plished a high degree of independence of exter- 
nal authority, and still be under the necessity 
of determining by what law he shall live. 
For the battleground of freedom lies within a 
man's own life, and the ultimate goal, as Jesus 
indicated, is not to win independence of the 
forces without, but to subdue the foes within. 
That which distinguishes man from the brute 
and lifts him out of the realm of necessity is 
his ability to reflect upon the life of impulse 
and view it in relation to a larger good. The 
animal acts always from impulse. If hungry, 
he snatches; if angry, he destroys. It is given 
to man to check impulse and bring it under 
the law of the higher self. This ability to 
stand above the impulse of the moment, above 
the entire impulsive life, is man's prerogative. 



THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 101 

It constitutes him a moral being. To say that 
man is a moral being is to say that he is a 
creature of impulse, but also that he is a 
personality which stands above the life of 
impulse, criticizes it, and legislates concerning 
it. The extent to which the personality has 
gained control constitutes character. Char- 
acter is nature disciplined. Character is co- 
ordination, complete and continuous self-mas- 
tery. The man without character is the man 
whose sensibilities are unorganized, in whom 
one impulse controls conduct. When the cold 
wind blows he becomes irritated; when ap- 
pealed to by appetite or passion he yields to 
the sway of sense. Such a man is a slave, a 
slave to his lower self. Long ago Plato spoke 
of the beast in human nature under whose 
sway every folly and crime is committed. So 
long as this monster remains undisciplined 
life has failed of freedom, even though the 
balmiest external conditions have been secured. 
The task of life, then, is to establish the 
control of personality over the lower self. 
That this is not easy may be seen from the 
number of failures that occur along life's way. 
Man is always in trouble by reason of his 
ignorance and weakness. He wrecks his health 
through excess, his happiness through folly, 
his soul through sin. One of the tragedies of 



102 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

life is instanced by the number of men of 
knowledge and high endowment whose hopes 
have been wrecked by the tyranny of passion. 
Here is Robert Burns, great-souled Burns, who 
writes one day to a friend: "By Babel's streams 
I have sat and wept, almost ever since I wrote 
you last. . . . I close my eyes in misery, and 
open them without hope. . . . God have mercy 
upon me! A poor, damned, incautious, duped, 
unfortunate fool! The sport, the miserable 
victim, of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imag- 
ination, agonizing sensibility, and bedlam pas- 
sions/' 1 And somehow, although perhaps in 
an exaggerated form, he strikes off the expe- 
rience of us all. "Oh, wretched man that I 
am! who shall deliver me from the body of 
this death?" 

II 

Man's failure in the fight for freedom has 
been largely due to ignorance. There are some, 
it is true, who have never set themselves to 
the task of subduing the baser passions, but 
their number is few. Most cases of failure in 
this regard are instances of a losing fight. 
Aware of the danger of an evil habit, the first 
impulse is to attempt to inhibit it — an attempt 
that always ends in failure. For in fixing the 

1 The General Correspondence of Robert Burns. 



THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 103 

thought upon a sin to suppress it you merely 
hypnotize yourself with it, and as a result the 
sin is greatly strengthened. To win freedom 
from a tendency toward evil, you must for- 
get it by losing yourself in some larger 
interest. 

This is a general principle of life. You can- 
not win health by thinking continually of 
yourself and your ills. You must forget your- 
self in some work that is pleasure and some 
recreation that is joyous. The same is true 
of happiness. J. S. Mill pointed out long ago 
that one can win happiness only by aiming 
at something else. This is known in ethics as 
the Paradox of Hedonism. A boy goes out on 
the ball field seeking a good time. If he thinks 
only of the fun he desires, he will miss a good 
time. If he loses himself in the game, he will 
come away to find that he has accomplished 
his desire. It is not otherwise with character. 
You cannot achieve character by saying: "Go 
to! I will now throttle this passion, root out 
this habit, and build character." Character 
is not won that way. You must lose yourself 
in some cause that is big enough to elicit your 
best effort, some interest sufficient to com- 
mand your attention. He therefore who 
promises to save men from sin, must offer 
such a cause and such an interest. 



104 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

III 

Jesus presents this larger cause and broader 
interest. He represents the beauty of per- 
sonality and the worthiness of it, so that in 
his presence man is forever shamed. In the 
love of him all baser interests are blotted out 
and the values of character become the chief 
object of desire, for the life of Jesus as the 
revelation of what man ought to be constitutes 
a court from which there is no appeal. Once 
he is known, all other interests are brought 
for judgment before the bar of his example. 
There is henceforth one law, at once the voice 
of Jesus and the voice of one's inner self, de- 
manding unqualified obedience. 

But this law, as the essential principle of 
one's nature, is also the will of the Eternal, 
and therefore in yielding to it the individual 
comes into union with the Eternal. Herein 
lies the source and spring of freedom. Little 
has been accomplished if the effort after 
liberty stops with a crushing recognition of 
what one ought to be. The law is to be an 
emancipator, not an enslaver. The fact of 
human weakness bears witness how necessary 
is this union with the Eternal if man is to 
fulfill the purpose of his being. Through 
obedience to the law of the larger life he opens 
his soul to the streams of the divine, which 



THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 105 

become within him a new power, a new capa- 
bility, and a new hope. Thereby the forces of 
destruction are counteracted, weakness is em- 
powered, and largeness of life becomes possible. 
Ours is a world in which marvels have re- 
sulted from the contact of personalities. A 
word from Napoleon could restore courage in 
the heart of an army. Who can measure the 
possibilities of a life when it comes under the 
touch of Jesus Christ? It is not easy to be 
good. The climb of life is steep; there are 
obstacles in the way, and the will is all too 
feeble. There is an effort, however, that suc- 
ceeds, not because of itself alone but because 
of the new life-force to which it may lay claim. 
Before the will enfeebled and enslaved by 
sin Jesus stands with the promise, "The Son 
will make you free." What though the past 
has left a legacy of failure? What though the 
present reveals incapacity by reason of the 
death of faculties of the soul? "I am come 
that ye may have life, and that ye may have 
it more abundantly." This is the promise. 
"To as many as received him, to them gave 
he power to become the sons of God." 

IV 

Here, then, is the principle of Christian 
liberty. 



106 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

1. Man is free only to choose the form 
of his obedience. If human life has a meaning, 
this involves a law by which that meaning 
may be realized, and that law is revealed, in 
the effort to live, as the way to a full life. 
We may choose that law or follow our own 
impulses, but in either case we are under 
authority. The instrument of self-direction in 
personality is the will. A lawless will is a 
misnomer. As a function of personality the 
will must be true to the law of its own nature. 
It cannot transcend itself nor deny its own 
claims. We escape the principle of self-direc- 
tion only when we cease to be ourselves. 
From the grain of sand to the farthest star 
freedom lies in obedience to law; all else is 
disorder and self-destruction. Man is no 
exception to this universal rule. The only 
liberty that man can know is the ability to 
live out unhindered the essential purpose of 
his own being. 

2. True freedom is an achievement. It be- 
gins with the first recognition of the claims 
of personality. It grows with the increase of 
the control of personality. It is never com- 
plete, for the process of the unfolding of 
personality is limitless. This is the task that 
is ever before us. Every attainment is but 
the scaffolding to a higher reach of attainment. 



THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 107 

We are ever to seek to surpass the best in us, 
and press on in hope and assurance toward 
the greater possibilities before us, confident 
that that power which has sustained us will 
see us through to the end. "Not that I have 
already obtained, or am already made perfect: 
but I press on, if so be that I may apprehend 
that for which also I was apprehended by 
Christ Jesus." 

3. In the effort after freedom, the material 
of the lower self is not to be destroyed; it is 
to be transformed. The good man is not the 
passionless man. The baser stuff of sense is 
the weight by which we rise. As the kite 
ascends by reason of the resistance of the air, 
so the human spirit attains its climb through 
those very limitations that hamper it. We 
may not be ready to admit Francis Thomp- 
son's claim that imperfections are the coloring 
in the perfect picture, but undoubtedly they 
are the colors out of which the picture is made. 
It need not be the cause of discouragement 
that the pulse of passion is strong. This is 
a reservoir of force waiting to be harnessed 
to a worthy end. Nay, more, because of the 
unity of personality it is the very force that 
being redirected becomes the power of will and 
the strength of personality. Passion uncon- 
trolled and irregulated constitutes a danger, 



108 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

but passion controlled furnishes the oppor- 
tunity, test, and measure of virtue. 

4. Since the law of the higher self and the 
will of God are one, the ultimate goal of life 
is the same for all. The aim of each is to 
secure his own growth and development, but 
that aim is common to all. And here we touch 
the basis for a free society — a community of 
individuals each seeking a common aim and 
laboring to make conditions favorable to the 
attainment of that aim by all. "Act," says 
Kant, "so as to use humanity, whether in your 
own person or in the person of another, always 
as an end, never as merely a means/ 5 This 
is the first principle of democracy. It is the 
fatal mistake of both the individual and of 
society that humanity is treated as a means. 
When all men everywhere come to regard 
human life as of supreme worth, and seek for 
themselves and for all others the values of 
personality, then shall begin that age of free- 
dom so long prophesied. 

V 

The lessons involved here are of perennial 
importance. What is the malady at the heart 
of our civilization to-day? Let me quote the 
answer of one serious observer. 1 "The steady 

1 Herbert Croly, Disordered Christianity, The New Republic, December 
31, 1919. 



THE PROBLEM OP FREEDOM 109 

expansion of secular knowledge is the dom- 
inating fact in the lives of the Christian peoples. 
It is exercising an ever more complete and 
irresistible authority over both the conduct 
and the conscience of mankind. But its au- 
thority is devoid of moral sanction. The new 
knowledge has done little or nothing to enhance 
or to liberate human life as a whole. On the 
contrary, it is vesting the moral ownership 
of incalculably formidable engines of power in 
particular classes and nations whose special 
interests are opposed to general human ful- 
fillment. If the secularization of knowledge 
continues, it will ultimately wreck civilization." 
There is rebellion to-day against recognized 
authority in society. We see it in politics, in 
industry, in religion. "During the war," said 
one labor leader, "they taught us to be lions' 
whelps, and now they want us to subside 
quietly into beasts of burden. We shall never 
do it." There is a real danger here. So far 
as conditions make difficult the living of life, 
they ought to be changed. But we must not 
forget that external conditions are not the 
sole determining factor in a man's life. In- 
deed, the very crux of the problem of freedom 
is absence of determination by anything out- 
side oneself. The life of the animal is deter- 
mined by conditions; man, on the other hand, 



110 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

lives within the world of his own character. 
You may preach economic theory until your 
hair is white and men still remain slaves in 
their lives. What the world to-day needs, 
primarily, is not a new social order so much 
as a wider knowledge of the ideal of life, and 
a more general recognition of those moral 
sanctions through which alone humanity as a 
whole can find true freedom. 



CHAPTER VIXI 
WHAT IS TRUTH? 

What is truth? There is no question more 
ancient or more essential than this. It was 
asked in the Egyptian temple; it is still the 
query in the modern university. The reason 
for this unfinished inquiry lies in the fact 
that it touches the whole range of human 
life. In the common mind truth is a matter 
of mere verbal accuracy, but in reality the 
term has a much deeper significance. It repre- 
sents the substance and content of the rational 
and moral life. There is no good that exceeds 
it. "The inquiry of truth/ 5 says Bacon, "which 
is the love-making or wooing of it — the knowl- 
edge of truth, which is the presence of it — the 
belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it — 
is the sovereign good of human nature." 1 

Yet strangely enough, no question has been 
more generally ignored, and to this ignorance 
may be traced much of the tragedy of human 
life. 



» The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, p. 736. New York, E. P. 
Dutton & Company. 1905. 

Ill 



112 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

"O purblind race of miserable men, 
How many among us at this very hour 
Do forge a lifelong trouble for ourselves, 
By taking true for false and false for true!" 

What is the source of the disappointment, de- 
feat, and shame, that weigh down the lives 
of individuals? In brief it is Tennyson's answer, 
they take the true for false, the false for true. 
This is the story of Esau and Absalom, of 
Pilate and Judas. Wisdom says, "Choose this; 
it is not so pleasant now, but it is the greater 
good/ 5 No, this seems better. And so for the 
price of a moment's pleasure, the real values 
of life are spurned. Here is a man in the 
prime of his years, but the hand of death is 
upon him. He is walking under the shadow 
of his own folly. Nature and society both 
combined to give him a good start, his life 
might have been useful and happy; but he 
"forged a lifelong trouble for himself." He 
believed the true worth of life was to be found 
in self-gratification, so he courted self and 
played with passion, and thought it good; 
and now too late he wakens to his mistake, 
for there is a sovereignty in the truth that 
cannot be evaded. You may ignore it, or 
reject its claim, nevertheless you must answer 
to it. As George Eliot puts it: "It is the truth 
that commands you. And you cannot escape 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 113 

it. Either you must obey it, and it will lead 
you, or you must disobey it, and it will hang 
on you with the weight of a chain which you 
will drag forever/ 5 

I 

But what is truth? Have we a right to 
censure a man for his folly until we can offer 
an answer to the question? There is no truth, 
says one; all knowledge is relative. Just as 
light and heavy, cold and heat, plenty and 
want, are relative terms, so are truth and 
error. Water boils at 212° Fahrenheit; liquid 
air boils at 312° below zero. You place water 
on a fire to boil; you place liquid air on a cake 
of ice and it boils. The power derived from 
liquid air is simply steam generated by the 
temperature at which we live. A coin on the 
hand is warm or cold according to the tem- 
perature of the skin. So it is with all expe- 
rience. Knowledge comes through opposites, 
and is relative to the range and degree of 
opposition. There is no such thing as absolute 
heat, absolute weight, absolute truth. All 
truth, says Nietzsche, is relative to man's 
power. That which suits his purpose is true; 
that which is opposed to it is false. 

But grant that all knowledge is relative, yet 
one may be honest in reporting his experiences. 
Truth, then, is the correct statement of fact. 



114 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

In some regards this claim has a vital im- 
portance. There is nothing more needed than 
sincerity among men, that one's outward 
deportment shall be in accord with his thought 
and intent. But in the scientific sense, the 
sense in which it is ordinarily taken, this claim 
is confronted with difficulty. Our experiences 
are seldom alike; no two men look upon exactly 
the same world. And if it be said that the 
consensus of judgment makes fact, this too 
must be recognized as uncertain. One genera- 
tion declares that the sun moves round the 
earth, another that the earth moves round 
the sun. Humanity is constantly revising its 
judgments to meet the exigencies of life. 

Truth, then, is conviction. At least we may 
rely upon those beliefs that come to us with 
immediate certainty. But conviction has shown 
itself to be subject to enlightenment. Nothing 
has so marred the story of human progress 
as false conviction. From the Carthaginian 
placing his child upon the red-hot lap of 
Moloch, to the Indian fakir; from the thumb- 
screw and the rack, to the present-day in- 
justices born of social hysteria, conviction has 
proven itself a dangerous guide. 

But has there not been conserved out of 
the centuries of human history a residue of 
knowledge upon which we may all agree? 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 115 

Truth is tradition. Alas! it is just here that 
we do not agree. Not only do many deny the 
authority of the past over the present, but 
there is no unanimous understanding of that 
which the voice of the past conveys. Who 
is to choose between the hundred warring 
creeds through which tradition is mediated to 
us to-day? Or why should we choose? The 
world is older with each generation, and ought 
to present new and larger views of the nature 
and meaning of life. 

II 

There is an old story from the closing days 
of Jesus' life that is suggestive here. Jesus 
was brought before Pontius Pilate by the Jews 
charged with claiming to be a king. This 
charge, because of its political character, im- 
presses the governor, who enters into a dis- 
cussion with the prisoner. As a Roman, 
Pilate's conception of kingship is that of 
physical dominion. The mission of Rome was 
to rule and command by force. This concep- 
tion is back of the question he addresses to 
Jesus, and gives to it a touch of sarcasm, "Art 
thou the King of the Jews?" But Jesus dis- 
claims the purpose to establish a kingdom 
of physical force. "My kingdom is not of 
this world: if my kingdom were of this world, 



116 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

then would my servants fight, that I should 
not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my 
kingdom not from hence/' 

"Art thou a king then?" What other basis 
can kingship have? What other foundation is 
possible for sovereignty? "Thou sayest that I 
am king. To this end was I born, and for this 
cause came I into the world, that I should 
bear witness unto the truth." Ah! truth— 
the question is shifted. This man is not a 
rival of Caesar; he is a new teacher. He means 
to conquer by the power of ideas. At once 
the intellectual history of that age passes 
before Pilate's mind. He sees the whole 
philosophical development of the period, aim- 
ing to discover and present the truth, termi- 
nating in skepticism and despair of knowledge. 
Here is another wild enthusiast offering to 
reveal the undiscoverable. With a half-sarcasm, 
the half-sad exclamation of skepticism, he 
answers, "What is truth?" 

Here Jesus interposes words that are of deep 
significance. "Everyone that is of the truth 
heareth my voice." In this more or less 
enigmatic statement is the key to Pilate's 
question. Notice he does not say, everyone 
that heareth my voice is of the truth. Pilate 
was wholly mistaken. Truth is not a matter 
of ideas; it is an affair of life. Ideas are 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 117 

ever open to debate; there is nothing final 
in them. Life is final. Life presents an 
ultimate standard for the judgment of values. 
Therefore Jesus came not to present a new 
system of ideas, but to live a life. Not all who 
heard his words understood that life, but all 
who grasped his ideal of life saw the truth 
of his words. "Everyone that is of the truth 
heareth my voice." 

Ill 

If, then, the consideration of truth as knowl- 
edge terminates in skepticism, Jesus offers a 
new line of approach to the question. With 
him truth is not impersonal, scientific. "I am 
the truth/ 5 In the implications of this state- 
ment we find the answer to our question. 

1. Truth can be manifest only in a life. 
It is a person, living in the relations of life, 
true to all that those relations require. This 
is the foundation of all shades of interpreta- 
tion of the term. Verbal accuracy, conviction, 
the true representation of fact, are manifesta- 
tions of an underlying personality, and acquire 
their value from the person which they express. 
Jesus could not have answered Pilate's ques- 
tion in words. Words are of worth only as 
the expression of character. Therefore Jesus 
lived a life, and his words were but to make 
plain the meaning of that life* He said: 



118 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

"Service is the law of life* Suffering is the 
law of service. Love is the first principle of 
being. Greatness and goodness are one/' Are 
these statements true? Whether they are or 
not depends on whether the application of the 
principles stated to human relationships con- 
tributes worth to man's being. 

It is significant that the Greek word dXrjdEia, 
ordinarily translated "truth/' usually stands 
in the New Testament for "righteousness." 
That is, the meaning of the term, as conceived 
by the New Testament writer, is broader than 
intellectual rectitude; it includes rightness of 
conduct as well. In fact, intellectual rightness, 
or truth, is considered as only one aspect of 
that moral disposition which the term de- 
notes, and upon which truth depends. *Now, 
in the terminology of the New Testament, 
"righteousness" has a very definite meaning. 
It is that disposition of life that takes as its 
norm the will of the Eternal. Truth, therefore, 
as here employed, means nothing else than 
the advance of life toward its own perfection. 
This reflects the significance of Jesus' state- 
ment when he said, "I am the truth." In 
him the life of righteousness is seen complete. 

The border-line between truth and right is 
indefinite at best. What is truth, and what 
is right? Right applies to conduct measured 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 119 

by a norm. Truth refers to the life, which is 
at once the source and standard of conduct. 
It is the ideal of being that man shall con- 
stitute himself a full personality. That ideal 
is implicit in us all. It forms the norm for all 
judgment. An act is right which expresses 
the fuller personality, or contributes to its 
fulfillment. The difference between truth and 
right, then, is the distinction between a life 
and its expression. This identity of meaning 
in the New Testament usage explains the 
presence of "truth" rather than "right" in 
Such passages as John 3. 21, "He that doeth 
truth cometh to the light"; also 1 Cor. 13. 6, 
"Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in 
the truth." 

2. Only as we live the life of righteousness, 
can we hope to understand the meaning of 
truth. "He that is of the truth, heareth my 
voice." "Only he," says Lotze, "for whom 
truth is true can recognize it as truth. . . . The 
understanding can find truth only where it 
sees the content of its thought agreeing with 
a standard which it carries within itself." 1 
Of old it was said of Jesus that when he should 
appear, to many he would be without form 
or comeliness and there would be no beauty 
about him that they should desire him. Right- 



i Lotze, MicrocosmuSf ii, 698. 



120 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

eousness is never desirable to the unrighteous, 
nor purity to the impure. Rectitude of life is 
necessary to rectitude of thought. "It is more 
blessed to give than to receive/ 5 You cannot 
prove that proposition to a selfish man. If 
he declares it more blessed to get than to give 9 
you are silenced; he is not of the truth. Purity 
is a beatitude only to the heart that has aban- 
doned its evil passions. This fact reveals the 
central problem in the effort after the world's 
evangelization. How shall we get men to 
forsake that which they love and accept that 
for which they have no desire? At best the 
acceptance of the life of righteousness is a 
venture of faith. We put the life of virtue 
to the test and find it supremely good. In 
the very nature of things this could not be 
otherwise. Since truth is life, and knowledge 
comes through experience, there is no means 
by which one may learn that righteousness is 
desirable except by putting it to the test. 
And since the life of righteousness as the will 
of the Eternal is also our truer self, there can 
be no doubt as to the verdict when once it 
has been tried. 

3. There is a commentary on this statement 
in a recent article on the Foundation of the 
State. 1 What is the ground of the authority 

1 David Jayne Hill, The Foundation of the State. Reprinted from The 
Fra, November, 1916, by permission. 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 121 

of the state? One answers, "The power to 
compel obedience/' No, that is the philosophy 
that might makes right, a philosophy we in 
America, at least, disclaim. Obedience is not 
duty- Furthermore, if any group of persons 
in the state are strong enough to resist, they 
are under no obligation to obey. Well, then, 
the authority of the state rests in the will of 
the people. But what authority have ten 
people that one does not have? Or what 
right have ten to impose their will upon one, 
if that one does not wish it? What, then, is 
the foundation of the state? There is in 
every one of us a sense of justice, and with 
it a corresponding sense of obligation. This 
lifts a man above personal preference and 
makes him capable of society. This is the 
soul of which the state is the body. Not he 
that heareth the voice of the state is of the 
state. He may harken through fear, and be 
an outlaw in his heart. But he that is of the 
state heareth the voice of the state. 

IV 

Certain far-reaching implications follow from 
this view of truth. First, it suggests that 
ultimate reality is personal. Just as thought, 
word, and deed are instruments for express- 
ing the inner life of man, so the world of things 



122 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

is the means of expression of an underlying 
personal life, which is its ground and support. 
Our thought and purpose manifest themselves 
in and through spatial objects which we 
create, such as houses, gardens, and harvests. 
In like manner the spatial world as a whole 
is the revelation of a hidden thought and will. 
Philosophy has always drawn an inadequate 
distinction between truth and reality, as if 
truth were something external to or above 
existing things, when it is present only in the 
thought of some thinker while he thinks or 
in the action of some being while he acts. 
Truth cannot exist independently of being; it is 
real only as the nature and habitude of being. 
This distinction has led to much loose think- 
ing in the endeavor to interpret the nature of 
reality as a whole. Reality, we are told, is 
universal life, power not ourselves, impersonal 
will, unconscious reason. But these are all 
empty phrases, names for nothingness. As 
Borden P. Bowne has said, "Intelligence and 
reason are such only as they are guided by 
ends; and a guidance by ends means nothing 
except as those ends are present in conscious- 
ness as ideal aims." 1 Unless we are ready to 
adopt a crass materialism in our conception 

1 Borden P. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, p. 127. New York, Harper 
& Brothers. 1887. 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 123 

of ultimate reality, a consistent logic forces us 
to think of it as personal. 

Any interpretation of nature is of necessity 
a product of our own thought. That is, it is 
a construct, formed through the application 
to the world of appearance of the laws of the 
mind. But if that construct is to have valid- 
ity, the laws of thought must also be the 
laws of nature. The possibility of truth lies 
in our ability to reduce the phenomena of 
nature to an intelligible order, and that order 
can be real only as the expression of intelli- 
gence. 

The theory of evolution was supposed for 
a time to have dispensed with personal agency 
as a basis of reality, by substituting for it the 
reign of law. It was discovered that the 
whole creation is not only ruled by law but 
that it is determined by law. As a result, law 
was given a substantive character, and set 
behind the world of things as its cause and 
sufficient explanation. But a more candid 
inquiry as to the meaning of law has shown 
the fallacy of this position. A law is only a 
description of the process by which an agent 
works; it explains nothing, but is itself in 
need of explanation. It is truth only as a 
statement of a method of action. 

All reality is an eternal spirit. All things 



124 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

that appear are but manifestations of the 
Eternal. The heavens and earth are a mirror 
in which we behold the Eternal Goodness, and 
discover the plan he is working to fulfill. 
From him all being flows; in him all life sub- 
sists. Nature is the declaration of his thought. 
Human perception, so far as it is true, is the 
interpretation of the thought of God, for 
God is truth. Effort after truth is effort 
after God; truth acquired is God possessed. 

V 

The discussion leads finally to a practical 
question: How may we be of the truth? This 
is the ultimate question of the Christian life. 
We gain excellence here as in the pursuit of 
any art. How does the artist win perfection? 
He chooses a perfect model, and copies it 
until he grasps, first the general rules involved 
in its production, then the basic principles. 
So it is with the art of life. Imitation is the 
first law of progress in character. It is the 
supreme merit of Jesus that he has made 
known to us the truth as life. The perfecting 
of humanity consists in a faithful embodiment 
of the mind and life of Jesus. It is a law 
that we tend to become like that with which 
we are constantly associated. The ancient 
Greeks who lived daily in the presence of the 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 125 

statue of Apollo unconsciously became erect* 
As we contemplate the perfect life of Jesus 
we tend to become like him, until imitation 
grows into consecration. "We all, with un- 
veiled face, 55 says the apostle, "reflecting as 
a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed 
into the same image from glory to glory, even 
as from the Lord the Spirit." Jesus is the 
perfect man — the final form of truth. As we 
follow him we are of the truth; as we live in 
him the meanings of life become plain. 



CHAPTER IX 

IS PERFECTION POSSIBLE? 

Human perfectibility has been the ideal of 
every religion. The Chinese sage, the Greek 
philosopher, the Indian yogi, and the European 
Christian all agree in this, that man ought 
to attain to a perfect state. These teachers 
have not agreed on the content of perfection, 
nor the path by which it is to be won. One 
would reach it by meditation, another by edu- 
cation, still a third by inspiration; but all 
are unanimous in the claim that human ex- 
cellence is to be desired. "Religion/" says 
Borden P. Bowne, "aims at the perfect and 
will have the perfect or nothing/' 1 Even the 
atheist has not dissented from this statement. 
Nietzsche embodied it in his doctrine of the 
Superman. From the beginning the vision of 
the perfect man has floated before the human 
mind. 

I 

Nothing is more marvelous than that this 
dogma should have been so unanimously ac- 

* Borden P. Bowne, Personalism, p. 293. Boston, Houghton Mifflin 
Company. 1908. 

126 



IS PERFECTION POSSIBLE? 127 

cepted, for the one thing quite evident is the 
fact of man's incompleteness. Men may have 
lived who have attained complete bodily de- 
velopment, but who has reached the fullness 
of his mental and moral powers? The per- 
fect man, in whom all mental and mora! 
capabilities are fully realized, is far before us, 
if, indeed, he has broken upon the vision of 
some of us. The great souls of history repre- 
sent but a single phase of the ideal life. The 
saints of the Bible were not faultless men. 

Is perfection possible? What perfection can 
this be? Humanity free from all defect? Lack 
of infirmity of will or soul? Is not all human 
perfection relative to our limited and varying 
conditions? We do not expect perfection in 
a fresco as in a painting, in a piece of plaster 
work as in a frieze. We think of the lily as 
beautiful, and yet in the tropics it grows to 
be many feet across, and with the most delicate 
hue. There are conditions of life that make 
it inevitable that some souls should be dwarfed 
and, struggling up, attain little. The condi- 
tions are adverse, the growth is slow, the 
time is short, the goal is high. Yet ever in 
the mind of man rings this challenge, "Be 
ye perfect, for your Father in heaven is 
perfect/ 5 

The conclusions of modern science have re- 



128 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

acted against belief in the possibility of attain- 
ing a perfect state. Man is no longer con- 
sidered as a degeneration from a primeval 
condition of excellence, which he may recover 
suddenly by the triumph of divine grace in 
his life. He is a personality in the making. 
For ages he has been fighting his way up from 
the lower levels of animality to a diviner 
type of life. Essentially this struggle is to 
constitute himself a self-determining being — 
to bring his entire nature under the control 
of the ideal of reason. Personality emerges 
with the beginning of this control and advances 
toward perfection as control increases. It 
follows that perfection can be conceived no 
longer as faultlessness, for the ideal emerges 
with the development of personality, and al- 
ways runs ahead of it. No human being ever 
realizes his ideal. Where there is ignorance 
mistakes will occur; where the will is undis- 
ciplined life will fall away from its goal. What 
we are is at best only a fragmentary repre- 
sentation of what we know we ought to be. 

The Christian life is sometimes defined as 
an identification with the life of Jesus. He 
has set before the believer an example of 
excellence which all are expected to follow. 
The goal of Christian endeavor is to embody 
in character and service the example and 



IS PERFECTION POSSIBLE? 129 

spirit of the Master. But there is a sense in 
which the life of Jesus immeasurably tran- 
scends even our best attainment. The holiest 
men have made confession of this fact. After 
two thousand years of Christian history, Jesus 
still stands above us as an example of moral 
excellence and spiritual being, after which 
we may ever reach, but to which no one ever 
fully attains. 

n 

If, then, we cannot attain our ideal, in what 
sense is perfection possible? Evidently, the 
term can be applied to man only in a relative 
sense, except as it refers to the will or intent 
that governs the life. The will may be wholly 
turned from evil toward righteousness. Such 
a will may err for lack of knowledge, or be- 
cause of inability to command conditions; 
nevertheless it never deviates from its direc- 
tion, being wholly fixed upon God. 

There is no Christian teacher who has 
spoken with clearer insight upon Christian 
perfection than John Wesley, the founder of 
Methodism. Wesley made this doctrine cen- 
tral to his thought. The significant thing in 
his teaching in this regard is the emphasis he 
laid upon the will in the Christian life. While 
he was insistent upon the need of the Chris- 
tian attaining to the experience of holiness, it 



130 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

was not his thought that this experience is 
to be understood as faultlessness in conduct 
or blamelessness in character. <r By perfec- 
tion," he says, "I mean the humble, gentle, 
patient love of God and our neighbor, ruling 
our tempers, words, and actions." It would 
seem that he purposely avoided giving the 
impression that perfection is sinlessness. His 
definition of sin as "voluntary transgression 
of a known law of God" would prohibit this. 
Perfection is a matter of the purpose or dis- 
position of one's life. It is being able to say, 
"I am come to do not my own will but the 
will of him that sent me." It is a life inspired 
and controlled by one aim, and that to know 
and to do the will of God. 

It is not Wesley's thought, however, that 
the perfect man is simply one whose motive 
is ever right. Life lived from the level of 
duty is not the Christian's highest privilege. 
Duty implies anxiety and fear, but Scripture 
represents to us the possibility of a life of 
peace. Peace is attainable only through the 
control of the whole nature by some positive 
principle that fills consciousness and makes 
righteousness easy. That principle is spiritual 
love. This transforms duty into pleasure, and 
makes the most irksome task radiant with 
joy. Think you that Father Damien found 



IS PERFECTION POSSIBLE? 131 

a life of service for the Molokaian lepers a 
task? Did he offer himself upon the altar of 
sacrifice only because duty demanded it? 
Not so. He moved under the impulse of a 
divine constraint that made each day's service 
a delight, because it was what his soul would 
choose. 

Ill 

There is a wholeness about this view of 
perfection which is its chief merit. Science 
has made this an age of specialization. Time 
was when every physician was supposed to 
be competent to treat any part of the human 
organism. It is not so to-day. One gives 
his thought to the stomach, another to the 
heart; one to the eye, another to the ear. 
This is an age of specialists in the science of 
medicine. The naturalist, by reason of the 
extent of his field, is unable to master all the 
forms of nature. The study of one branch 
of the animal kingdom alone is the task of 
a life-time. This specialization is necessary 
in art, literature, and industry. Our industrial 
life is so highly organized that to each work- 
man falls a single task, and in this he must 
be expert. The field of literature and art 
has become so extensive that any reasonable 
production requires a division of labor. But 



132 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

in the very nature of the case there can be no 
specialization in morals. Morality is a dis- 
position of the soul toward the duties of life; 
it is the reaction of the human spirit in the 
field of conduct, and it is not possible to be 
expert in one sphere of conduct and ignore 
the rest. Whatever else may be said of our 
morals, they must be well rounded; that is, 
they must apply to all days and all acts. 
We are too inclined to be Christian special- 
ists. There are few of us but excel in some 
one grace, while we are greatly lacking in 
others. One is large in sympathy, but weak 
in faith. Another is strictly honest in business, 
but fretful and irritable in little things. Church 
members are often firm in their belief in the 
doctrines which the church inculcates, and 
this is commendable; but too often they are 
devoid of that Christian love without which 
such belief is as nothing. This is not the 
Christianity of Jesus Christ. He has no place 
for Christian specialists. He calls for that 
attitude of soul which always and at all times 
disposes one to follow the divine will. 

"Holiness" is a word not held in the high- 
est respect in the popular mind of our day* 
With many the term is associated with fanat- 
icism and sensationalism. This is unfortunate, 
for, rightly understood, there is no more 



IS PERFECTION POSSIBLE? 133 

noble word in our language. Several reasons 
have no doubt contributed to this misunder- 
standing, but there is one for which we our- 
selves are largely to blame. In our popular 
usage the term has been employed to indicate 
a negative condition; it has been interpreted 
as referring not to the possession of something 
excellent so much as to the absence of some- 
thing branded as bad. But holiness in the 
New Testament is a distinctively positive term. 
It is more than innocence. Innocence is a 
clean sheet with no writing on it; holiness is 
a clean sheet, but with a lot of writing on it 
— writing of a definite kind, the record of 
self-conquest and self-development. Holiness 
is heroism, and heroism of the boldest type, 
heroism in the moral life. There are men 
to-day who, if called to take up arms and go 
to the front in defense of their country, would 
do so gladly. We call them heroes, yet these 
same men have had habits and impulses am- 
bushed in their lives for years, enslaving and 
hampering them. They know these enemies 
are there, they know they are undermining 
their life, and they have never had the courage 
to rise up and drive them out. It is easy to 
be a hero on the battlefield of the nations; 
it is hard to be a hero on the battlefield of 
the soul; and that man who sneers at holiness 



134 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

as something cheap and sentimental simply 
does not know what holiness is. He has not 
entered into a warfare with the enemies in his 
own life. He has never undertaken a fight 
to the finish with selfishness and lust. He has 
never tried to walk the path marked out by 
the Son of God. For the distinctive achieve- 
ment of the life of Jesus was this, that he was 
a man and lived among men, and was perfectly 
holy. He did not seek seclusion as a better 
condition for living a holy life. Conditions 
never once were accounted by him. He took the 
world as it was, and lived his life and retired 
from the scene without a blot on his banner 
or a single record of defeat. And what was 
this perfection of Jesus? First of all, and 
chiefly, it was a perfection of will. His first 
recorded utterance is, "Did ye not know that 
I must be about my Father's business?" 
Every thought and deed after the moment of 
that utterance was governed by the purpose 
these words express. Throughout the varied 
experiences of his ministry he was completely 
devoted to the doing of the will of God. And, 
this is the perfection you and I may hope 
to attain. We cannot expect to be blameless, 
but we ought to have that attitude of will 
which always seeks to do the right. Not 
that we shall ever reach a finished perfection, 



IS PERFECTION POSSIBLE? 135 

Any state of perfection involves the possi- 
bility of advance. Christianity, it is true, 
presents the ideal of an absolute good, and 
bids men seek after it; but at the same time 
it makes clear that the good for us lies in our 
growth toward that ideal, a growth measured 
by the degree of our devotion to it. 

IV 

The assertion of Scripture, then, is that a 
life of outward obedience to the will of God 
is a means of inner transformation. Thereby 
the springs of a man's life are changed. So 
that doing the perfect will of God ultimately 
results in inner completion of one's being. 

There is a modern theory of ethics which 
teaches that in the struggle with environment 
man is making himself; that day by day as he 
labors to subdue his passions and follow the 
law of reason he is constituting himself a moral 
being. The little child is not a moral being, 
but only the prophecy of one. His nature 
is a sort of ground-plan upon which the years 
to come are to build the structure of the life 
to be. Struggle and effort, success and fail- 
ure, the joys of triumph and the regrets of 
defeat all have their place in this process of 
construction. At no time is the task complete; 
there is always something more to be gained. 



186 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

Goodness is perpetual self -development; and 
human life is defined in the paradox, I build and 
yet in building I am. 

This theory is in harmony with the teaching 
of the New Testament. The Christian's task 
is to obey the divine will, but in so doing the 
inner life is ever renewed. Take one outstand- 
ing illustration. Here is the fisherman Peter, 
to whom Jesus one day said "Follow me." 
Peter was weak-willed and impulsive, but 
Jesus made no mention of these frailties. He 
simply said, "Follow me"; and Peter fol- 
lowed. He failed, but he kept his will set 
on following: he denied, but he did not desert; 
and one day Jesus turning to him said, "Peter, 
when thou hast fully recovered thyself, 
strengthen the brethren." In these words 
Jesus looked forward to the day when, as a 
reward of faithful obedience to his command, 
Peter would become strong enough to sustain 
the wavering faith of others by his example. 
Peter at last became a new man in Christ, 
but he never thought of himself as faultless. 
Writing his letters to those of the Dispersion, 
he speaks words of strength, but they are the 
words of a man who in humility and by the 
help of God is still struggling on. 

It is not the thought that this gradual 
transformation is wholly the result of one's 



IS PERFECTION POSSIBLE? 137 

own effort. If one were left to fight his way 
single-handed upward toward excellence, the 
task, even if possible, would require more 
than an ordinary lifetime. From the human 
standpoint the full Christian life is a surrender 
of the soul to God; in its divine aspect it is 
the life of God in the soul. The will which 
is devoted to God is energized and made 
capable of something greater than was pre- 
viously known. All growth comes through the 
expression of a life-principle, which may be 
solicited, or directed, but which is itself orig- 
inal. We sometimes think it possible to add 
graces to a life from without. This is the 
method of a false culture which says, "Take 
a man as he is and add to him." But that 
method spells failure. God's method begins 
within. "For it is God that worketh in you 
both to will and to do of his good pleasure/ 5 
All the graces of character are from God, 
though it please him to attach them to obedi- 
ence. Growth in character is increase in 
capacity for spiritual appropriation, whereby 
the power of the Eternal becomes available 
to us. 

A traveler from Japan has said that in that 
country, arctic in winter, tropical flora are 
to be found. Scientists explain this phenom- 
enon by saying that the land is volcanic, 



138 FUNDAMENTALS OP FAITH 

and beneath the surface is a heat with which 
the roots are in contact. The inworking of 
God is a source of constant renewal in the 
life. There is no grace or goodness possible 
to us but finds the secret of its growth in him. 
Beneath and beyond all, there is a source of 
energy producing for those who seek them 
those states of soul which are desirable. Life 
is triumphant as it realizes in itself this power 
of spiritual renewal. This is the vindication 
of the claim that obedience to the will of God 
is the condition of the perfect life. 

Not long ago a prominent layman in the 
church absented himself from public worship 
because the theme for discussion was "Chris- 
tian Perfection." He regarded it a waste of 
time to discuss a mere fiction. No man, said 
he, can be perfect in the absolute sense, and 
there is no other sense in which the term 
can be employed. This man was right, but 
he was also wrong. There is a perfection that 
belongs to the Christian, the only perfection 
possible to man. That is a perfect devotion 
to the ideal of life, expressing itself in a con- 
stant endeavor to apply the spirit of that 
ideal to every fact of experience. Such a 
devotion results in a perpetual growth toward 
the standard which the ideal presents. Other 
objects in our world are perfect by reason 



IS PERFECTION POSSIBLE? 139 

of some function which they perform. Man 
is an end in himself, an end, however, which 
is implicit. Perfection, therefore, is progress; 
and since God himself is the end, and God 
is in all, we have the assurance that growth 
will finally reach its goal when man has at- 
tained to God. "Not that I have already 
obtained, or am already made perfect: but 
I press on . . . toward the goal unto the prize 
of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." 



CHAPTER X 

LIFE'S GREAT PARADOX- 
SELF-ASSERTION VERSUS SELF- 
RENUNCIATION 

Oue discussion so far has dealt largely with 
the individual in his endeavor after self- 
realization. We have now to notice that the 
fullest life for the individual is not possible 
apart from the lives of others. 



In the common mind self-interest and service 
are usually considered as rival terms. The 
former suggests a person following selfishly 
his own private gain; the latter, the soldier, 
missionary, or the nurse, who renounce life's 
comforts, even life itself, for a cause the good 
of which they themselves will never share. 
Here is a distinct opposition, and one is forced 
into the equivocal position of either being 
frowned upon by society as selfish, or sub- 
mitting to a course that appears to be both f - 
irrational and unjust. 

The teaching of Jesus has not escaped this 
140 



LIFE'S GREAT PARADOX 141 

paradox. The very heart of his gospel was 
its exaltation of the individual. His message 
to men was the message of their own im- 
portance. He offered to the slave, the poor, 
and the oppressed salvation from debasing 
conditions, and an inheritance above the 
pomp of kings. Yet hand in hand with this 
appeal to self-assertion is the demand for 
self-denial. "Whosoever would save his life 
shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his 
life . . . shall save it." "If any man would 
come after me, let him deny himself, and take 
up his cross daily and follow me." How are 
we to harmonize these two apparently con- 
tradictory demands? 

Dr. G. Stanley Hall, in his recent work, 
Jesus the Christ in the Light of Psychology, 
explains this discrepancy by the claim that 
these statements represent different stages in ^#^ 
the development of Jesus' thought. "If Jesus S^ 
said all that is ascribed to him about the % 

Kingdom," says Dr. Hall, "those who seek to 
know his mature views concerning it are in 
the position of one given every saying of a 
great man on a great theme from childhood 
on and told that they are all put forth at the 
same time, stage, or level of his development." 1 
That would mean that in the earlier part of 

*G. Stanley Hall, Jesus the Christ in the Light of Psychology, ii, p. 359. 
New York, Doubleday, Page & Co. 1917. 



142 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

his career Jesus thought much of self-assertion 
—"What should a man give in exchange for 
his life?" In his later teaching he came to 
emphasize the value of life for society — "Who- 
soever would save his life shall lose it." Ac- 
cording to Dr. Hall, the consciousness of Jesus 
was not perfect from the start, it developed 
toward maturity, and therefore his later words 
are the only true representation of his mes- 
sage to the world. 

If Dr. Hall's claim is correct, it is an ex- 
ceeding misfortune that the sayings of Jesus 
were all transmitted to the church as being 
of equal value. This misfortune has filled the 
Christian thought of the centuries with con- 
fusion. But is it correct that there is an 
inherent opposition between these two groups 
of sayings — those admonishing self-assertion 
and those requiring self-denial? On the surface 
they appear discrepant; but if we look more 
closely, we find that in reality they are in 
agreement. Each is true, but not in itself 
alone. It is true only when taken with the 
other. "What should a man give in exchange 
for his life?" This statement is true, there 
is no more significant insight in our civil- 
ization. But, "Whosoever would save his 
life shall lose it." The goal of life is to make 
the most of oneself: and how shall this be 



LIFE'S GREAT PARADOX 143 

done? Not by self-preservation merely but 
also by self-renunciation. 

II 

First, we must emphasize that there is no 
particular merit in giving one's life away. 
There has been a great deal of loose thinking 
connected with our teaching concerning sacri- 
fice. No virtue appertains to self-sacrifice as 
such. It must have a reason, sacrifice must 
be for something. Whatever merit it obtains 
is derived from the end to which it contributes. 

Furthermore, it must not be forgotten that 
a man's first duty is with himself. Life will 
always remain an individual affair; it can 
never become selfless. The good man is one 
who respects himself; the bad man has lost 
this regard. The strong man is one who is 
sure of himself; the weakling never knows 
whether he is equal to the test or not. We 
are separate beings. Each man must bear 
his own burden, fight his own battles, win 
his own victories. Not only so, it is incumbent 
upon every man that he shall be true to him- 
self. We find the standard of our life within. 
No one else can tell us what duty is, what 
right is. What is right to you is right; what 
is truth to you is true; what is beauty to you 
is beautiful. Every man's world is great or 



144 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

small, dull or glorious, with the size or shade 
of his own soul. 

But a man is not a mere individual. He is 
the bearer of a common personality and the 
sharer of a common life. Life has its indi- 
vidual aspect; it has also its social aspect. 
We are called upon to recognize in others the 
same claims we make for ourselves. If my 
life is an end in itself, I am bound to grant 
the same as true of every other life. This 
was the significance of the commandment, 
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 
That injunction did not forbid self-love; it 
simply required that the rights we demand 
for ourselves we shall recognize as belonging 
to others also. 

Again, we have not stated the whole per- 
sonality when we have presented the claims 
of the individual as such. The person is more 
than a unit. It sustains relations with others, 
as father or mother, brother or sister, son 
or daughter, neighbor, citizen, friend. Indeed, 
it exists in these relations. An isolated per- 
sonality is inconceivable. The lives of indi- 
viduals are so closely knit together that it 
is impossible to consider the good of one apart 
from the good of others. The good for every 
individual is a social good — a good from which 
he cannot exclude his fellows. All action is 



LIFE'S GREAT PARADOX 145 

prompted by self-interest, but the quality of 
the action varies with the character of the self. 
The interest may be narrow or expansive. 
It may seek to favor the self at the cost of 
others, or it may seek the good of the self 
in the good of others. 

The relation of the individual to society, 
then, is a question of the size of the self. There 
are not two selves in each of us, the one ego- 
istic, the other altruistic, duty requiring the 
sacrifice of the one to the other. Every actual 
self includes social relations, and is meas- 
ured by the extent to which these are multi- 
plied and enlarged. The development of per- 
sonality implies an increase in identification 
with others' interests, and readiness to forego 
strictly personal ends that these may be 
realized. This means that as the life is broad- 
ened and deepened personal motives become 
more and more subservient to a larger interest 
and a larger good. Eucken has given splendid 
statement to this thought in an incidental 
definition of love found on one of his pages. 1 
"Love is primarily not a subjective emotion, 
but an expansion and a deepening of life, 
through life setting itself in the other, taking 
the other up into itself; and in this movement 



1 Life's Basis and Life's Ideal, p. 231. London, Adam and Charles 
Black. 1912. The Macmillan Company, Agents. 



146 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

life itself becomes greater, more comprehensive, 
and noble/ 5 This is simply a restatement of 
Jesus' words, "Whosoever shall lose his life 
shall find it." 

Selfishness and unselfishness, as applied to a 
person, are not mutually exclusive terms. 
They are relative terms. They represent 
different degrees of breadth of personality. 
Selfishness is short-sightedness. It indicates 
an interest that is narrow and exclusive. As 
Professor Dewey has suggested, 1 the man who 
keeps his seat while ladies stand is simply 
narrowly unconscious of factors in the situa- 
tion that should operate upon him. He sees 
only the seat, not the seat and the lady. This 
is the principle of all selfish action. It indicates 
a narrow interest, due to a narrow or in- 
different self. Unselfishness, on the other 
hand, is not being devoid of self-interest; it 
is the broadening of that interest so as to take 
in the well-being of others. As unselfishness 
increases, regard for others' welfare assumes a 
more and more prominent place in motivation. 
A man who being alone flees from danger, is 
not selfish; but a man who thinks only of his 
own safety when there are others who might 
be aided, deserves our condemnation. 



i Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, p. 381. New York, Henry Holt & Com- 
pany. 1913, 



LIFE'S GREAT PARADOX 147 

III 

This conception of the relation of the self 
and the other needs emphasis to-day. In 
both religion and economics confusion here 
has resulted in serious loss. On the one hand, 
the way of salvation has been marked out as 
the path of self-annihilation. The self -regard- 
ing interests have been interpreted by them- 
selves as constituting an entity which in prin- 
ciple and practice is wholly at war with the 
higher life. This is the self of nature, and 
it must be destroyed and another superimposed 
upon it if one is to live a saved life. The result 
has been a tendency in religion to asceticism. 
Whatever may have been the gains in the 
past resulting from a withdrawal from the 
world, for the literature of devotion asceticism 
has lost its appeal as a religious discipline. 
This is well, for the type of personality fostered 
by such discipline is both empty and ineffective. 

The old view has also been, and is, a source 
of error in economics. It has made for the 
disparagement of the individual, the assump- 
tion being that the individual is the old self 
of evil which must be destroyed. Political 
and economic salvation is to be found in 
collectivism. Just what collectivism is is not 
made plain, except that it is the negation of 
all self-regarding aims and interests, 



148 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

The relation of the individual to society 
must be one of community, not of antagonism. 
So far at least as our American ideal is con- 
cerned, organized society exists for the purpose 
of maintaining the rights of the individual. 
That social organization is best which secures 
to the individual the fullest chance for self- 
development. But self-development implies in- 
creasing interest in social harmony and a 
fuller recognition of the rights of others. 
The social theory that ignores the claims of 
the individual is grossly impractical; while 
the individual who denies the claims of society 
is blindly narrow. Only by participating in 
certain social arrangements, such as family, 
friendship, school, organizations for trade and 
for government, can the individual realize the 
good of life. His liberty becomes real through 
the opening up of social avenues of self-expres- 
sion. But at the same time responsibility is 
born. He becomes aware of the dependence 
of his own welfare upon the maintenance of 
and compliance with social requirements, and 
susceptible to others' rights. As the indi- 
viduality enlarges, this sense of responsibility 
grows, until one becomes more and more ready 
to sacrifice personal rights in the effort to 
gain larger liberties for the less fortunate. 

Jesus was neither an ascetic nor a collectiv- 



LIFE'S GREAT PARADOX 149 

ist. He mingled in the world's affairs and 
sought his salvation in and through them. 
He set out with the individual in his endeavor 
to establish a redeemed society. He recog- 
nized that the only society possible is one of 
individuals, and that such a society is a success 
or a failure according to the nature of those 
individuals. He declared that the greatness 
of a disciple consists in lowly service. A 
disciple must not think of himself alone; 
rather let him work on behalf of others for 
their welfare in a self-denying spirit. Thus 
alone his own supreme and proper welfare 
as a member of the Kingdom can be secured. 

IV 

The question is, then, How shall we acquire 
the larger self, the broader interest? The 
answer is that it cannot be done by fixing 
attention upon oneself. The man who thinks 
only of his own private interest is false to 
the larger self. "Whosoever would save his 
life shall lose it." 

The question here is one with the central 
problem of all morals: How shall we get men 
to resign the lower for the higher good, the 
immediate for the more remote? What is 
the sin of the sensualist? It is that he seeks 
his own satisfaction without reference to higher 



150 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

ends. What is the sin of the egoist? It is 
that he chooses the narrower instead of the 
larger interest. The principle of the sin in 
each case is the same. What is lacking is not 
knowledge of the good so much as the ability 
to rate the higher above the lower and give 
oneself to it. 

Christianity offers to impart this ability, and 
promises to do it through the contagion of a 
great personality. It is an ultimate law that 
the soul's affections can be changed only by 
the touch of a greater soul. Men know what 
is good, and yet remain in bondage to that 
which is base, until they are won to the service 
of the good through the impress of another 
whose life is dominated by the supreme Spirit, 
The Kingswood colliers were a coarse and 
brutal lot, given wholly to sensuality, until 
they came under the spiritual impress of John 
Wesley. Then their desires were changed, their 
horizons broadened, and a new and higher 
form of life was produced. And so it always 
is. Education, as the term is customarily 
understood, cannot produce the larger life. 
If the affections remain unchanged, education 
may result only in a cultivated villain, who 
employs his acquired faculties in the service 
of an enlarged self-interest. A trained in- 
tellect does not necessarily imply an upright 



LIFE'S GREAT PARADOX 151 

life. Education in the larger sense of the 
drawing out or unfolding of the possibilities of 
personality does constitute a saving discipline, 
but this is vastly more than intellectual in- 
struction. 

It is the supreme merit of Christianity that 
it has inspired in men this personal abandon, 
this interest in the larger good. Not only 
has Christianity created in the multitudes the 
desire to make some sacrifice for others 5 sake, 
but it has begotten in individuals in each 
generation that readiness to devote their lives 
to human well-being that has given us the 
missionary, the martyr, and the reformer. 
How has this been accomplished? Why did 
Paul choose poverty, suffering, prison, and 
death? Why did Savonarola risk his life at 
the hands of a frenzied mob? Why did Living- 
stone die for the sake of the black man? Why 
have the Lord's servants in all ages toiled on 
joyfully knowing they themselves would not 
see the fruits of their labors? Because of the 
example of Christianity's Saviour, the exam- 
ple of his cross. That cross brought to men a 
new sense of duty, reenforced by a sublime 
faith in God. It has fired a few great-souled 
men and women in each age with a holy self- 
abandon, and they by their word and example, 
as representatives of the cross ? have been 



152 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

lifting the generations out of self to higher 
things. Christianity as a process of heart- 
culture, is justifying its claim to be a fountain 
of energy for the creation and maintenance of 
the spiritual self. 

It is not difficult to multiply examples of 
lives that have been broadened through con- 
tact with the spirit of Jesus. In the city of 
Glasgow was a painter fast gaining prom- 
inence in his art. In the course of a series of 
pictures representing the life of his city he 
chose as a model a poor mother and child. 
The mother was in rags, and carried her babe 
along the wintry street. When the picture 
was completed he stood back and looked 
upon it, and suddenly a strange emotion took 
possession of him. He saw his own life over 
against the struggling multitude and he knew 
that henceforth his interest must be identified 
with theirs. He thought of the life of Jesus, 
and that life became a challenge to him. He 
resolved to forsake his art and become a city 
missionary. After a few years spent in Chris- 
tian work in his native city, again the circle 
of his interest widened. He decided to go as 
a missionary to Africa, and there among the 
tribes of Uganda he spent the remainder of 
his life endeavoring to bring cheer, enlighten- 
ment, and hope to that benighted people. 



LIFE'S GREAT PARADOX 153 

This briefly is the story of Bishop Tucker, 
a man who was led from a narrow self-interest 
to identify his own welfare with the well- 
being of the world. He is one of a long list 
who, beginning with the apostle Paul, have 
filled every age with the hope of better things. 
And whatever else may be involved, the 
world's hope to-day lies in the multiplication 
of such lives. Humanity has looked forward 
from the beginning to the coming of a new 
age. However much races have differed con- 
cerning the time or method of appearance of 
that age, all have agreed regarding its char- 
acter. It must be a time of peace and of 
good will. Peace is possible only when men 
individually and as a class learn to regard 
each other's interests as their own. There- 
fore let him who hopes for the millennium 
seek to develop within himself, and to inspire 
within others, that disposition commended by 
Jesus when he said, "Whosoever would save 
his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose 
his life for my sake and the gospel's shall 
save it." 



CHAPTER XI 
LIFE AND DEATH 

There are principles in our world that in 
their operation manifest themselves in differ- 
ent ways, and these manifestations sometimes 
take the form of apparent opposites. Failing 
to detect the underlying unity in these man- 
ifestations, we often look upon them as sep- 
arate and unrelated, or even as antagonistic, 
and lift to the dignity of distinct principles 
what are but varying expressions of one funda- 
mental law. Much of the confusion and 
many of the seemingly insoluble problems of 
life arise from this failure to trace the roots 
of so-called opposing forces back to a com- 
mon source, and seek their explanation by 
relating them to one another. 

Nowhere is this statement better exempli- 
fied than in our thought of life and death. 
It is customary to think of these terms as 
representing an eternal opposition — one, the 
effort to build up, the other, the endeavor 
to tear down; one, the law of self-preservation, 
the other, the method of destruction. We 
would scarcely think of attempting to har- 

154 



LIFE AND DEATH 155 

monize them, much less of unifying them. 
And yet perhaps just this is the key to the 
mystery of life and death. What we call life 
and death are progressive stages, the one 
unfolding into the other, the crest and trough 
of the wave by which eternal life in time 
presses forward to its fulfillment. 



It requires little evidence to show that 
man has always looked upon death with an 
attitude of dread. 

"Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
No life that breathes with human breath, 
Has ever truly longed for death." 

From the beginning death has cast its shadow 
over the face of human life. Life is good, 
and it has in it the promise of good to come; 
but death destroys that promise. In its 
presence all the values that make life desirable 
wither away. Love and hope and joy are 
gone; the reason and righteousness of things 
is destroyed; the sanctions of conduct are 
removed; the human heart stands bowed be- 
neath a weight of longing and loneliness. 
For if life stops at the grave, its worth, for the 
individual at least, is reduced to a minimum. 

This instinctive dread of death has been 
reenforced in our day by the attitude of science. 



156 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

The growth of materialism has brought science 
under the sway of sense, and in the light of 
the senses death seems supreme. Psychology 
scoffs at the possibility of the soul continuing 
its existence after the dissolution of the body. 
For what is the soul? It is a function of the 
physical organism. Does not consciousness 
depend for its existence upon the brain? Is 
not every act of a conscious being the result 
of cerebral action? Is not injury to the brain 
followed, not only by partial or complete 
loss of consciousness, according to its severity, 
but also with disorder in the moral life? This 
being the case, how can one reasonably be- 
lieve that consciousness persists, or that the 
soul survives after the moment of death? 1 

II 

While man has always had a dread of death, 
he has never been satisfied to believe that it 
is the end. Six thousand years ago, the Egyp- 
tians recorded their belief in a life after death; 
and from that day to the present, that asser- 
tion has never been silenced. For, , if the 
senses declare that death is extinction, other 
voices protest against that declaration. In- 
stinct and affection cry out against it. Our 

^he Materialist's argument has been summarized by Haeckel in The 
Riddle of the Universe, chap. xi. 



LIFE AND DEATH 157 

spiritual possibilities declare against it. In 
the world everywhere are dim analogies that 
suggest transformation rather than extinction. 
Night passes into day, winter into summer, 
youth into manhood. Francis Thompson, with 
his marvelous gift for similitude, sets forth 
this fact in his "Ode to the Setting Sun": 

"It is the falling acorn buds the tree, 
The falling rain that bears the greenery, 
The fern-plants molder when the ferns arise. 
For there is nothing lives but something dies, 
And there is nothing dies but something lives. 

Till skies be fugitives, 
Till time, the hidden root of change, updries, 
Are birth and death inseparable on earth; 
For they are twain yet one, and Death is Birth." 1 

The commonest things are born again through 
death. Shall man alone, who transcends them 
all, be but for a day? He will not believe it. 
It was not the intention to grant the claim 
of materialistic psychology, that its evidence 
proves that death is the end. No one will 
question the assertion that consciousness and 
the brain are in intimate relation. This is a 
matter of common observation. But it has 
not been shown that the former depends upon 
the latter. Indeed, there is strong evidence 
that the reverse is the case. No less a thinker 

1 The Works of Francis Thompson, Poems, vol. i. New York, Charles 
Scribner's Sons. 



158 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

than Weismann has maintained that the body 
is dependent upon the soul. The life-germ, 
in the process of its development, wins the 
power of clothing itself with a material body, 
and of laying it aside again* Death, then, 
is not the master of life; it is the servant. 
Life chooses death as a means of better ful- 
filling its function. "I consider death," says 
Weismann, "as an adaptation, and believe it 
has arisen by the operation of natural selec- 
tion." Death has not been from the begin- 
ning. As the structure of the organism be- 
comes complex, life, for the purpose of utility, 
sets a limit both upon its size and its duration. 
Life is continuous and unending; the forms 
in which it is manifest change and pass away; 
but it does not change, nor does it cease to be. 1 
This argument, of course, does not justify 
belief in personal immortality. It performs, 
however, an important service: (1) in silencing 
what has seemed to some an unassailable 
objection, (2) in suggesting a principle that 
may be carried over into the philosophy of 
personality. This principle is that only through 
death can life realize itself. There is a sense, 
however, in which the evolutionist has offered 



1 See Weismann's two lectures, "The Duration of Life," and "Life and 
Death." Dr. W. H. Thomson has presented this argument from another 
standpoint in Brain and Personality, chap. viii. Also Flammarion, Death 
and Its Mystery. New York, The Century Company, 1921, chap. ii. 



LIFE AND DEATH 159 

direct support to belief in the survival of the 
person. For millions of years, so he declares, 
life has been struggling upward through multi- 
tudinous forms, and for what? To reach at 
last its culmination in a person. In man life 
has achieved a form that gives meaning to 
the whole. In man a goal is reached that 
justifies millenniums of pain and travail. But 
now, having achieved this goal, is man, the 
product of the ages, to be but for a day? It 
cannot be. 

Ill 

It must not be forgotten that in the very 
nature of the case proof is impossible with 
regard to the possibilities of life. Life is not 
a theory, nor is it reducible to theory. It is 
a force; it is not a matter of knowledge but 
of belief. 

In The Riddle of the Universe Haeckel scoffs 
at Kant's dictum that the immortality of the 
soul is not an object of pure reason, but a 
postulate of practical reason. "We must set 
practical reason entirely aside," he says, "to- 
gether with all the exigencies of emotion and 
moral education, etc., when we enter upon 
an honest and impartial pursuit of truth." 1 
Exactly, and having done so, one conclusion 

1 Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, p. 202. New York, Harper 
& Brothers. 1900. 



160 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

necessarily follows — a denial of everything 
concerning life that is not the product of 
rational inquiry. 

But is this method justifiable? Who can 
tell what electricity is? or who will attempt 
to demonstrate the possibilities of electricity? 
There are certain fundamental truths that 
have nothing to do with knowledge; they have 
to do with conduct. This is so of all the 
essential facts of life. Knowledge may, as 
Bergson says, petrify the stream of life, cut 
a cross-section in it, and analyze it. But that 
which it represents is no longer life. Life is 
force in application. It is "a continually grow- 
ing action/ 5 It is a constant effort toward 
the creation of new forms. It is the act by 
which the form is shaped. One may analyze 
what it has been, and yet be unable to prophecy 
what it will be. So far as that prophecy is 
possible, it must be based upon assumptions 
necessary if we are to live at all. Immortality 
is not an object that may be observed, nor 
a truth demonstrable by logical reasoning. 
It is something that can be known only as it 
is experienced, and must otherwise be received 
on faith. Life at best is a great act of faith. 
The aims which give it value are aims that 
cannot be attained in the world of sense. 
To accept them is to believe in more time, to 



LIFE AND DEATH 161 

deny them is to negate life itself. To live at 
all one must find the strength to affirm the 
eternity of the human spirit. 

IV 

The idea that the true meaning of life is 
realized only through death is not new. It 
has haunted the mind of man from the earliest 
time. Plato taught that only through death 
can life come to its own. Socrates welcomed 
the hemlock because it set his spirit free from 
the prison of mortality. But Plato's thought, 
so far as it relates to the nature of immortal 
life, is wholly negative, and death has no 
other relation to life here than that of pro- 
viding an escape from it. Therefore Plato's 
teaching falls short as a philosophy of life and 
death. 

It is only when we approach the gospel of 
Jesus, that we find this idea given in positive 
form — that the relation of life and death be- 
comes vital. In brief, the teaching of Jesus 
is that man is able to rise, here and now, 
above the conditions of time, into the divine 
life. This he does by renouncing the lower 
and more material interests and seeking the 
higher and more spiritual. This renunciation 
prompts the birth of new powers and possi- 
bilities that are enduring. Thus life in the 



162 FUNDAMENTALS OP FAITH 

flesh becomes a continuous process of death, 
whereby in each conquest over the lower self 
the higher life is realized. The final dissolu- 
tion of the body, therefore, is the culmination 
of this process, or the death of death. Thereby 
the life of the spirit wins its full freedom. 
This higher spiritual life abides, for it shares 
the nature of the Eternal. 

1. There was no trust more confident in 
Jesus than the belief that death for him was 
not to be the destruction of his person. This 
trust did not arise because of a conscious- 
ness that his relation to God was unique. 
It belonged to the view of life he offered to 
all men. The kingdom which he proclaimed 
had as its essential element the idea of eter- 
nal life. Every disciple partakes of this 
benefit upon the earth, and continues a sharer 
in it in spite of earthly death. The ascent of 
Jesus to the heavenly life through death was 
to be shared by each of his followers. They 
are to pass from the earthly existence into 
participation with him in the life of the Father's 
house. 

2. Furthermore, the last discourses of Jesus 
give prominence to the thought that after 
his death he would yet remain in relation 
with his disciples. Death, he assures them, 
is only an outward separation; in reality he 



LIFE AND DEATH 163 

would be in helpful union with them. Not 
only is the idea of his continued personal 
existence emphasized, but of his living partici- 
pation in their lives. Through death his per- 
sonal influence was to be multiplied. He 
would be with them in a more real sense than 
he had been before. 

These are days when the broken ties re- 
sulting from the war have turned the thought 
of large numbers toward the spirit world. 
They are inquiring anxiously as to the rela- 
tion which their lost ones sustain to them. 
While one must guard, and especially in time 
of grief, against being led astray by super- 
stition and fraud, nevertheless we must not 
overlook the most patent teaching of the 
religion of Jesus, that those who leave us are 
still in helpful relation with us. It may be 
outside the range of possibility for us to com- 
municate with them, or they with us. Jesus' 
view of life, however, presupposes as un- 
questionable this truth which has ministered 
so much comfort to sorrowing hearts. 

3. Jesus refrained from speaking in detail 
regarding the nature of life after death. Once, 
however, he was challenged by the Sadducees 
to defend his teaching in this regard. The 
Sadducees seem to have been unable to con- 
ceive of life in other than sensuous terms. 



164 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

Jesus, therefore, repudiates the sensuous char- 
acter of eternal life, and asserts that it must 
be conceived under spiritual forms. These 
forms he defines merely in one word, "union 
with God." The indissoluble relationship which 
men sustain with God as their Father is the 
source of eternal vitality. This has in it 
the germ of an endless growth, whose inner 
principle is to seek through death the emanci- 
pation of spiritual being. 

4. This everlasting life is the true life of 
man. It is not something grafted on to man's 
natural being. It is the issue God purposed 
for every child of his. It contributes value 
to man's earthly existence. The life of the 
poor, the despised, the persecuted, is worth- 
ful in its light. Even affliction becomes trivial, 
or serviceable, since the true worth of life 
lies not in the permanence of the physical, 
but in spiritual being. Man belongs to eter- 
nity by birthright. To know himself, and real- 
ize his possibilities, is eternal life. 



This thought of Jesus became the dynamic 
of the early church. At first, after his death, 
the disciples were overwhelmed with sorrow 
at the idea that he was gone from them for- 
ever. But in a little while there came to 



LIFE AND DEATH 165 

them the belief that he was still alive, their 
confidence returned, and with it a clearer 
understanding of what he had said to them 
before his death. This belief brought not 
only a rebirth of courage but the triumphant 
conviction of the truth of his Messianic claims. 
Now inwardly grounded, they set out to preach 
Jesus in the face of a world's skepticism. 

No conception ever inspired in the mind of 
man has been the source of greater comfort 
than this. Thereby fear has been destroyed, 
and life and hope and consolation are born. 
Many a heart has turned away from the tomb 
to resume its tasks with an abiding peace 
that otherwise could not have been. This 
teaching of Jesus has given humanity the secret 
of strength. It has armed the soul against 
weakness, failure, and discouragement. Live 
in the spirit and you share the divine omnip- 
otence. The body is no longer a clog, a prison, 
or an enemy; it is an implement of the spirit. 
It is a necessary condition in the process 
toward the soul's completed being. Death 
becomes the gateway to a fuller life. "Except 
a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, 
it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it bear- 
eth much fruit." As the grain of wheat through 
the law of decay releases the life-principle 
and rises up in multiplied form, so the life 



166 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

of the soul is conceived as finding through 
death its deliverance and fruition. Here is 
true consolation. For this vision faithful 
souls have been able gladly to work and wait, 
confident that they would see again familiar 
faces and hear the old sweet words of love. 



CHAPTER XII 
THE RISEN LORD 

The resurrection of Jesus is the fundamental 
fact of the Christian religion. Christianity 
did not begin with the teaching of Jesus, his 
miracles, nor his blameless life. When Jesus 
died upon the cross, and his body was laid 
away in Joseph's tomb, his followers went 
back to their homes disheartened. His dis- 
ciples put away their hopes and gathered in 
that upper room hallowed by their last meet- 
ing with him, and talked of the light that had 
shined only to be snuffed out forever. "We 
had hoped that it was he that should redeem 
Israel"; but now that hope was gone. 

No more bitter day can come to a man than 
the next morning after death has entered his 
home. The hope that sustained through the 
days of the fight is gone; the battle is lost. 
Life still goes on, but a cloud hangs over it 
that shuts out the light of the sun. Why has 
the morning come again? Why does life go on 
when its motive is lost? Not otherwise was 
it with the disciples that morning after the 
crucifixion. It is significant that the evan- 
167 



168 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

gelists leave no record of that day. Why 
should they? There was nothing to record. 
The Master is gone, and his disciples return, 
each to his place, hopeless and bereft. 

But suddenly all this is changed. One 
fact restored the disciples' faith, and sent 
them out to win the world. Into their soli- 
tude a messenger came who said, "The tomb is 
empty. He is not there/ 5 They hurry forth 
to see, and "entering into the tomb, they saw 
a young man sitting on the right side arrayed 
in a white robe; and they were amazed. And 
he saith unto them, Be not amazed: ye seek 
Jesus, the Nazarene, which hath been crucified: 
he is risen; he is not here. . . . He goeth forth 
before you into Galilee." 

This message became the impulse of a new 
life. Sorrow vanished, courage returned. They 
set out led by the Spirit of the living Lord to 
proclaim his kingdom. Christianity, as a 
religion of spiritual power and renewal, was 
born on that day. The resurrection of Jesus 
made Christianity. 

But strangely enough, no fact of Jesus' life 
has been more fiercely assailed than his resurrec- 
tion. Especially is this the case in our own day. 
Ours is an age of criticism, when everything 
must present itself before the bar of investi- 
gation. Nothing can escape. Truth must not 



THE RISEN LORD 169 

base its claim upon long recognition, nor divine 
authority. It can stand only on the ground 
of evidence. No doctrine has suffered more 
from this attitude than the resurrection of 
Jesus. Not because the evidence is inadequate, 
but because of a reaction against miracle that 
has prejudiced the case against the resurrec- 
tion. The attacks that have been made 
have ignored the evidence largely, while they 
base their rejection upon opposition to the 
supernatural. 

It cannot be too often emphasized, that to 
reject the resurrection of Jesus on the ground 
of the impossibility of miracle is to create 
another miracle as impossible as that which 
we hoped to avoid. For if Jesus did not ap- 
pear after his death, how are we to account 
for that mental state which gave birth to 
Christianity, and created the Christian Church 
and the Christian Sabbath? How did it occur 
that a group of men whose leader had been 
put to death as a criminal, and who were 
staggering under the shock of this disaster, 
came suddenly to regard him as the Master 
of life and death? A tree is the fruit of its 
environment; not otherwise is it with a mental 
state. Yet here is a group of cowards, upon 
whose leader the curse of God has come, and 
who have no hope but that all is ended, but 



170 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

who in the short space of six weeks rise up to 
declare that he who was slain is alive, that 
the curse has been turned into blessing, and 
that the seal of heaven is upon his life and 
work. These two states of mind are in ab- 
solute quarrel with each other. They are 
understood only on the ground that during 
those six weeks the revelation of a new force 
entered these men's lives, and that force was 
none other than belief in the miracle of the 
Risen Lord. 

Ordinarily, we reverse the legitimate order of 
procedure in our treatment of the question 
of the resurrection. We insist upon beginning 
with the resurrection as a cause, whereas the 
natural order of procedure is to begin with a 
group of facts and work backward to a sufficient 
source. What occupies the man of science 
first are the phenomena of nature. The study 
of electricity did not begin with the establish- 
ment of a law, and then its application to the 
facts. It began with the lightning and sim- 
ilar phenomena; it adopted certain hypotheses 
to account for these phenomena, and finally 
settled upon the one that comprised the great- 
est number of facts. 

The character of the evidence for the resur- 
rection of Jesus is unimpeachable. No other 
fact of history has been better attested. It 



THE RISEN LORD 171 

is not simply angels proclaiming to women 
that Jesus is risen, nor the finding of the tomb 
empty, that is advanced as a reason for accept- 
ing this fact. It is based upon the same kind 
of evidence as that upon which any human 
knowledge depends. All the New Testament 
records testify that Jesus appeared to his 
disciples, and to others, after his death. These 
people could not be mistaken. They knew him, 
and identified him by indisputable marks. 
They were too many, and too diverse in tem- 
per, to enable us to attribute their belief to 
hysterical enthusiasm. They not only believed 
themselves, but they proclaimed the fact in 
the place where Jesus died, and to the people 
who had seen him put to death, and in one 
day three thousand accepted their testimony. 

But in case this evidence should, for some 
reason, be rejected, then we must insist upon 
the employment of the scientific method in 
our consideration of the case in hand. Here 
we are, surrounded by a group of facts — 
related results, which require an explanation. 
The Christian Sabbath is an effect for which 
we must find an adequate cause. For twelve 
hundred years and more Saturday was ob- 
served as the Sabbath. Why the change to 
Sunday? Here is the Christian Church, with 
its sanctuaries, schools, and homes of mercy, 



172 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

scattered over the world. Whence did it come? 
Here are multitudes of transformed lives — men 
and women, who through faith in a living 
Christ have been lifted out of selfishness, 
worldliness, and low ideals, up to a higher 
and purer life. These phenomena require an 
adequate explanation. The resurrection of 
Jesus provides one that comprehends all the 
facts. No one has been able to suggest an- 
other. Faith in the risen Lord does not rest 
upon the resurrection as an historical fact. 
It rests upon the existence of a world of love 
and grace in the midst of which we live and 
for which we must provide an adequate source. 
There is, then, a greater evidence which 
presents the spiritual fact which the resurrec- 
tion is intended to convey. That evidence 
is stated briefly in the words, "He is risen; 
he is not here. . . . He goeth forth before 
you into Galilee" (Eng. Rev.). The manner 
of the resurrection is secondary What we 
need to know is that the Lord is with us, 
leading the forces of civilization, and that 
he will be with us to the end. Of this 
fact the resurrection is the assurance; 
of the resurrection this fact is the evidence. 
The resurrection of Jesus is the point of transi- 
tion, where he who was a single figure in his- 
tory becomes the Lord of the ages. 



THE RISEN LORD 173 

1. For two thousand years He who was 
dead has been leading the forces of civilization. 
When they have halted, his word of command 
has been heard; when they have wavered, his 
hand has led them back. 

This statement is writ so large that it scarcely 
requires evidence to support it. I take but 
one instance. That is our conception of time. 
Of old there was no universal time-measure. 
Early peoples dated events by the foundation 
of their city or the reign of their king. But 
Jesus stamped his name upon the calendar of 
the civilized world. He began a new era, alive 
with meanings drawing their inspiration from 
him. Here was furnished a point of time 
about which might be assembled the facts 
of history. From henceforth time was divided 
into two divisions — before Christ and after 
Christ. There was one event that stood in 
such vital relation to all history that all be- 
fore it was preparation and all after it result. 
And to-day business and politics, legislation 
and literature are all adjusted to the chro- 
nology of Jesus. 

How does this come about? How is it that 
a native of a subject province, a Man who 
during his lifetime exerted a narrow influence, 
who was cast out by his own people and died 
a criminal's death, has written his name 



174 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

across the face of human history? He was a 
great teacher, but the world had had great 
teachers. He died as a martyr, but in this 
he was not alone. The answer is to be found 
in the fact that He who died is still in the 
midst of his people, directing the forces of 
life into new channels. He is risen from the 
dead, and goes before you. Whatever we 
may think of the event in Joseph's tomb, 
Jesus has been living in the life of the cen- 
turies, a spiritual fact working in the midst 
of men from out the unseen world. Despite 
continued opposition, his spirit has taken 
hold 01 the life of the race; it has awakened, 
inspired, and instructed that life, and lifted 
it up toward better things. 

"But/ 5 you say, "this does not argue that 
Jesus rose from the dead. Other men, about 
whom no such claim has been made, have 
left an abiding influence behind. Plato lives 
and Caesar lives/ 5 You miss the point. The 
civilization to which we refer has not drawn 
its life from the personal influence of Jesus 
as transmitted through his words, but from 
the conviction that he is alive and in the 
midst of his people. This was the dynamic 
that impelled the early messengers of the 
cross, that made them equal to any task. 
This is still the motive power of all Christian 



THE RISEN LORD 175 

endeavor. "Lo, I am with you alway, even 
unto the end of the world/ 5 Plato could create 
a school; Jesus created a civilization. Plato's 
influence was a memory; Jesus' influence has 
always been a presence. The belief in a 
living Christ has been the sustaining power 
of the Christian believer. It has inspired in 
the missionary that spirit of personal abandon 
necessary to the spread of the gospel in the 
land of danger. It has begotten a confidence 
that has lived and labored in times of failure 
and defeat. The Christian has not only found 
instruction in Jesus' words, and direction in 
his example, but he has been sustained, day 
by day, amid the toils and dangers, the tempta- 
tions and losses of life, by the sense of an 
abiding Presence. 

2. He goes before you to-day. You may 
not call yourself a Christian man, you may 
not belong to the Christian Church; but tell 
me, where do you get your ideals of right, 
the ambition you have to do good and to 
make humanity better? 

What is the intelligent motive of effort in 
behalf of the common good and the increase 
of happiness to-day? What incentive lies 
back of our world of philanthropy? The 
desire to make the conditions of life more 
favorable. But is this desire sufficient to 



176 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

create a civilization that has as its aim to 
banish disease and lengthen life, to lessen 
trouble and lighten toil, unless it have back 
of it a supreme sense of the value of human 
life? Our civilization, comprising its manifold 
agencies for enhancing the meaning of man's 
existence, was born of an awakened sense of 
the value of the human personality. And 
whence came this sense of value? Human 
life, though endowed with its loves and hopes 
and aims, is an empty thing if these are shut 
within the limits of the world of flesh. 

Any object acquires its value from its 
destiny. Things of little worth become worth- 
ful when they are made subservient to a 
worthy end. A block of refuse marble, out- 
side the gates of Rome, becomes a treasure 
of art, when chosen by Michael Angelo as the 
instrument of his genius. Even so the human 
personality, valueless as a thing of time, gains 
merit when its destiny is revealed. Man, as 
a child of eternity, rises above the ills and 
hurts of time. His life wins an end within 
itself, and henceforth the aim of human en- 
deavor is to employ the things of time so 
far as they are helpful, to eliminate them so 
far as they are a hindrance, to the attainment 
of that end. 

The resurrection of Jesus brought to the 



THE RISEN LORD 177 

world a revelation of the destiny of human 
life. In the presence of the risen Lord belief 
in the eternity of the soul was born, and with 
that belief a civilization that seeks, through 
education, philanthropy, and the mastery of 
nature, the fulfillment of that destiny. And 
every man to-day who believes in education, 
science, and charity, and works for the better- 
ment of human conditions, lives under the 
inspiration of a conception of life that was 
born of the broken tomb. 

It is no mere accident that Christianity is 
the only type of civilization that has made 
for true enlightenment and for progress. Every 
other civilization has lacked the incentive to 
progress, because it has failed of its conception 
of the destiny of man. Christianity alone 
possesses the energy for advancement, for it 
alone reveals what man is to be and imparts 
the power to realize that end. The religion 
of Jesus, unlike other religions, calls a man, 
not to the performance of acts and ceremonies, 
but simply to the task of self-realization. Its 
very motive is development. But that motive 
would be powerless, were it not for two facts: 
that in the person of Jesus is given a demon- 
stration of the possibility of life, and that the 
risen Lord has impressed upon the world a 
belief in the eternity of life. Under the in- 



178 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

spiration of these two facts Christianity has 
become a power that has made for the eman- 
cipation and elevation of the human person 
and the awakening of the higher energies of 
man's nature. It has filled the heart of the 
world with a hope that has created new views 
of what man is to be and new agencies for 
the realization of that being. 

3. He goes before you for the days that 
are to come. Humanity marches into the 
future under the inspiration of a dual hope, 
that the race will attain to a new world, that 
the individual will attain to a new life. This 
twofold hope was born of the resurrection of 
Jesus. 

The other day, when the Great War began, 
and the ear of the world was filled with stories 
of the barbarities of cultivated nations, men 
of little faith complained, "Christianity has 
failed." This complaint was an unintended 
tribute to the power of Christianity. Why, 
Christianity has failed? Why not, education 
has failed, science has failed, humanity has 
failed? No, we have considered humanity 
a failure, and have not hoped greatly that 
science or education could redeem it. But 
we have believed that Christianity was accom- 
plishing, and would ultimately accomplish its 
redemption. And why Christianity? It has 



THE RISEN LORD 179 

given to the world the ideal of a new age, 
but this has not been the dynamic of the future 
hope of the generations. Plato gave in his 
Republic a vision of what mankind ought to 
be. The dynamic of the world's faith for the 
future has rested in those words appended to 
the Great Commission, "Lo, I am with you 
alway, even unto the end of the world." Hu- 
manity has accepted the challenge of Jesus 
to bring in the future kingdom, because it has 
believed that he was present, working with 
it, and that in that presence resides a power 
that makes the impossible attainable. That be- 
lief was born of the word of a risen Lord. 

Sin is the world's great problem. The hope 
of the future lies in breaking the power of sin. 
The bringing in of a new age is not primarily 
a matter of legislation, nor of education, but 
of regeneration. So long as sin remains, man's 
happiness is marred, and his possibilities 
destroyed, no matter what other gains are 
made. Therefore, from the beginning, hu- 
manity has looked for one who could save 
from sin. This Jesus claimed to do, not merely 
by reason of his own example, but through his 
ability to bring into life a saving power. Be- 
lief in that power, and therefore the hope of 
a new age, was born on the day of the resur- 
rection. For two thousand years the Chris- 



180 FUNDAMENTALS OF FAITH 

tian army has been marching toward the 
future, laboring and praying for the coming 
of that age. If Jesus is no Saviour, if the 
rock of belief in his Saviourhood is removed, 
all the worse for the world. Its hope of a 
redeemed humanity is gone. But while unbe- 
lief complains, millions in whose lives the reign 
of sin has been broken rise up to reaffirm their 
hope of a new world because of their experience 
of the power of a present Lord. 

Furthermore, he goes before you into the 
valley of death. Life for each of us is filled 
with uncertainty, but in nothing is that un- 
certainty greater than in the event of death. 
Death is the great omnipotent fact, with which 
everyone must reckon, yet about it we know 
nothing except that it will come. The when, 
the how, the where are hidden from us. To- 
day the babe is snatched from its mother's 
arms, to-morrow the youth is taken in his 
strength, or the wife and mother in her woman- 
hood. If we could only "wrap the drapery of 
our couch about us and lie down to pleasant 
dreams," but we cannot. No ministry that 
can come to human life can contribute more 
greatly to man's contentment and ambition 
than that which can create the belief that 
death is not an enemy but a friend. This the 
resurrection of Jesus has done. It has put 



THE RISEN LORD 181 

in place of the grave the sun-lit splendor of 
the New Jerusalem. It has filled human 
hearts with a glad ambition to make the most 
of themselves and of their time here, not 
because death is the end, but because it is 
the true beginning. 

Then let us rejoice in a risen Lord whose 
presence is certified, not by extraneous evi- 
dence, but by a world of life and love and 
hope, which bears witness to him every day. 

"The Lord is risen indeed. 
He is here for your love, for your need — 
Not in the grave, nor the sky, 
But here where men live and die; 
And true the word that was said; 
'Why seek ye the living among the dead?' 

"Wherever are tears and sighs, 
Wherever are children's eyes, 
Where man calls man his brother, 
And loves as himself another, 
Christ lives! The angels said; 
'Why seek ye the living among the dead.' "* 



1 Richard Watson Gilder, "Easter." Boston, Houghton Mifflin Com- 
pany. 



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